“All Of Us Strangers” paid my therapy bills

There are a great deal of films that focus on the ways we reconcile with our childhood, but I've never seen it done in such a concise and poignant way as this.

There are so many conversations we all need to have with our parents, but it can be hard when the story is ongoing, and sometimes you wish you could take a step out of time and reality to confront all those feelings while you're in equal positions of power. So the image in this film of a son and a parent, both the same age, one moving through time and one stood still at the end of their story, is both incredibly cathartic and devastatingly heartbreaking.

It doesn't feel right to call this film simple. It's focused, and it isn't grand in the typical sense. But it deals with some of the most raw, important feelings that we can have. Feelings of grief and loneliness, and our constant guessing as to whether the people we've lost would accept us as we our now. And like a lot of my favourite films, All Of Us Strangers bends reality in order to investigate deep personal truths. Much like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or even a more satirical film like The Lobster, All Of Us Strangers uses its surreal premise to showcase scenarios that almost everyone will think very deeply about in some point in their life.

That's the real beauty of cinema for me. We're allowed to explore ideas that don't obey the laws of the real world, but they still have deep emotional truth. When it's done as beautifully as it is in this film, it opens up the opportunity for a deeply cathartic experience that we can take with us for the rest of our lives.