London Film Festival 2023: ALL OF US STRANGERS & LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL

He who is tired of London is tired of life, said Samuel Johnson. And he who is tired of the London Film Festival needs more caffeine.  Today’s reviews from LFF 2023  feature vampires at Paul Mescal‘s door and devils in David Dasmalchian‘s studio, a divine combination if ever there was one.

All Of Us Strangers (Andrew Haigh)

Another year, another performance by Paul Mescal playing a quietly broken young man in a film about revisiting long-dead parents. The parents in this one, however, belong to Andrew Scott’s Adam, a lonely screenwriter who finds his parents, more than 30 years after they died in a car crash, still living in his childhood home, the same age as they were when they died. Meanwhile, in only slightly less spooky circumstances, he meets Mescal’s Harry, seemingly the only other resident in his J.G. Ballard-like tower block, which begins a blossoming relationship.

Like his 2015 film 45 Years, Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers deals with the past reemerging in the present. “Well where else would it emerge?” you might ask, but here it’s literally in the present. Just a train journey away, Adam can revisit his childhood home exactly as it was, and his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell), exactly as they were, only faintly surprised that their son, grown now, is back home.

I don’t know quite how they’ve done it, but Foy and Bell are playing Parents. They’re Mum and Dad, not the people they were before they were parents. We never know their names because they’re not full people: they’re Mum and Dad. Bell somehow seems to play the memory of every father who ever lived. There’s something in his soft northernness (and excellent jumpers) that makes him simultaneously emotionally standoffish and emotionally comforting. And Foy tweaks her voice to be a Mum’s voice: ever so slightly disapproving but unmistakably loving throughout that disapproval.

Alongside the relationship with Harry, this is unsurprisingly the story’s main driver. But it’s not the only past trauma pushing itself into present view. It couldn’t be. As Adam explains to Harry, becoming closer after a first encounter where a drunken Harry arrives at Adam’s door to have it politely closed on him, Adam’s sexuality, his shame, his fear and his parents’ death all got “tangled” up together. So when one trauma reappears, the others come along too. 

Yes, things are much better now: no longer is anyone derogatorily telling Adam or Harry that their ‘haircut is gay’ (in part because, as they discuss, ‘gay’ has been usurped by ‘queer’). But, as Adam says, ‘It doesn’t take much to bring it all back’. Things are better now, but the bad things don’t disappear from one’s memory, nor one’s present, merely because of a more tolerant present.

It’d be wrong – and overly optimistic – to call this a post-homophobia film. But it deals with queerness and homophobia similarly to how The Hurt Locker deals with war: namely, with its effects in a world which tells you that the trauma is past. The war is over, they’ve left the front line, but the scars remain and, as here, far from reopening them, are open still.

Mescal almost steals the show as the mysteriously troubled northern-accented neighbour Harry, but this is Scott’s film. Matching Haigh’s typical restraint, Scott covers his face whenever he gets emotional – hiding it from his parents and from us. And it’s all the more tear-jerking for it, as any good director will tell you that someone desperately trying not to cry is always more emotional than someone sobbing dramatically.

Haigh’s restraint is cast off at the climax, which many will no doubt find saccharine but which I’m a sucker for. Like Adam learns to do, Haigh opens up and wears his heart, if not on his sleeve, then at least poking out from under his cuff as he soundtracks his film about the power of love to the song The Power of Love. He did it in 45 years, where the ending song was a transcript of what was going through Charlotte Rampling’s head, and he does it here, ending with a song in Font Size 30 spelling what the film is about. For me, like everything else in the film, it does more than work – it swells and soars.

Late Night With the Devil (The Cairnes Brothers)

The late night talk show has become a bit of a thing in film and TV recently. We had 2019’s comedy-drama Late Night. It was used as creepy exposition in the opening of the apocalyptic The Last of Us. And ‘Live with Murray Franklin’ saw the host get his head blown off in the psychological thriller Joker. Now, it’s horror’s turn in the Cairnes Brothers’ Late Night with the Devil.

In found footage style, it plays an episode – the final episode – of talk show ‘Night Owls’, hosted by David Dastmalchian’s perfectly named Jack Delroy. It’s a Halloween special and, trying to bring the spooks and revive the ratings, Delroy inadvertently brings horror into his set and the nation’s homes. While Late Night with the Devil won’t strike terror into its audience, it is terrific fun.

After a clever exposition dump via an introduction in the style of a TV retrospective on Delroy, we dive into the recording of the final late night show – complete with ‘Night Owls’ idents and announcer sidekick Gus (Rhys Auteri). We break from the format during ad breaks, switching to black and white and ‘the movie’, letting us into the increasing tension for the show’s cast and crew as things go from bad to worse.

Dasmalchian, in a rare leading role, is perfectly cast. Like a devilish Dick Cavett, he’s handsome and charming but with an underlying eerieness that his best-known roles (The Dark Knight, Prisoners, Dune) have brought to the fore in supporting parts so far. 

Alongside him, ‘Night Owls’ guests Ian Bliss as magician and mystic-buster Carmichael Hunt, Laura Gordon as parapsychologist June Ross-Mitchell and Fayssal Bazzi as spirit medium Christou ham it up just right. Dastmalchian is the only one who gets to do a bit more than mirror those finger-gun-after-telling-a-joke late night host mannerisms, but Late Night with the Devil doesn’t build characters that go too far beyond caricature – it’s not trying to. The caricature is part of the fun, which everyone here seems to be having.

But it’s not all parody. The desire for shock and sensationalism in pursuit of ratings that Delroy and his producer Leo (Josh Quong Tart) strive for is more familiar to today’s audience than it was in the 70s (find an episode of ‘The Dick Cavett show’ and compare it to today’s ‘talk’ show ‘The Tonight Show’). But the Cairnes Brothers know they’re not primarily writing a social commentary, so stick to the gleeful horror instead.

Their writing thrusts Checkov guns in our faces from the get-go but by signposting them so heavily it keeps us guessing when and how they’ll pay off. And pay off they do. When the film drops out of the talk show format, it loses a little of its viv – but only a little. And it doesn’t overstay its welcome, ending exactly when you know it should, at the 86-minute mark. This isn’t a backhanded compliment; any longer and it would’ve probably struggled to sustain itself.

Late Night with the Devil succeeds because it knows exactly what kind of film it is and sticks to the bit: a short, sharp shock of scares, brought to life (and devilish deaths) by a cast fully on board with its concept, providing a better 90 minutes of entertainment than most of the talk shows it’s sending up.