Irish heartthrobs Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott are finding love in the trailer for All of Us Strangers, a highly-anticipated gay romance from Searchlight Pictures. Andrew Haigh, the film’s director, adapted the story of the film from Taichi Yamada’s 1987 Japanese novel Strangers. 

In the upcoming film, Mescal and Scott play opposite one another in a neighbours-turned-lovers romance. Scott portrays Adam, a screenwriter, while Mescal plays his handsome neighbour, Harry. In the trailer, the couple is seen growing closer as Adam discovers that his supposedly long-deceased parents are actually alive. As a result, Adam travels to his childhood home to investigate. 

From there, the trailer devolves into a series of snapshots, some showing the ghosts of Adam’s past, others showing his growing relationship with Mescal’s Harry. 

While Haigh has been in the director’s chair before, when he directed the gay romance Weekend in 2011 and Lean on Pete in 2017, All of Us Strangers is a particularly personal film for him. 

“To suddenly deal with my own past at the same time as I was telling a story about someone else dealing with their past,” said Haigh in an interview with Vanity Fair. “I’m not sure if it was foolish, emotionally or mentally. But it was a really strangely cathartic experiment.”

Haigh similarly commented on how he wanted to approach the sex scenes in the film.

“Here, I really wanted to feel the subjective nature of having sex and what it feels like,” he told Vanity Fair. “The nervousness and the excitement and the physical sensation of being touched by someone else, and what that does to you.”

Both Mescal and Scott have established themselves as talented Irish actors, with credits in projects like 1917, Aftersun, Normal People, and Handsome Devil.

All of Us Strangers will hit theatres on December 22, 2023, following an initial premiere at New York Film Festival. Watch the first trailer below!