When words fail, there's always the Pet Shop Boys. In All of Us Strangers, their song Always on My Mind bridges decades of distance between Adam (Andrew Scott) and his parents (Claire Foy, Jamie Bell).
They're decorating a Christmas tree, hoping the Hallmark activity erases the awkwardness, when the song comes on. Adam's mum begins to sing along, the lyrics subbing for a full apology for absence. You were always on my mind.
After all, it's been a while: Adam's parents died when he was 10. Now in his 40s, he wanders around his old hometown to find his mum and dad in their family home, furniture and faces unchanged, as if no time had passed at all.
Catching them up on his life includes coming out as gay – his mum, surprised, says all the wrong things. Reality creeps in, even in this reunion between the dead and living: It's not how either side dreamed, even if the dream is so potent they've willed the impossible into existence.
"I think for so many people, particularly queer people, you can feel like a stranger in your own family," says Scott, who is gay.
"Even if they haven't directly rejected you, you just feel slightly different… [But] discomfort within a family and love within a family can coexist. It's pretty common."
Scott stars alongside fellow Irish actor Paul Mescal, who plays love interest Harry. He and Adam are two lonely hearts living in the same newly built London apartment tower, an ultra-modern space that is less haunted, than devoid of life.
"What's going on with Harry's family is actually slightly more insidious [than Adam's situation]," says Mescal.
"He's come out to his family. [They'd] say that they're very proud of him, but they actually don't truly accept him. Their acceptance of him is lip service, but they don't check in on him."
Written and directed by Andrew Haigh (Weekend; 45 Years; Looking), All of Us Strangers adapts Strangers, a 1987 novel by Japanese author Taichi Yamada, situating it within his world.
Japan is swapped out for contemporary London, the gay British filmmaker drawing out his repeated themes of modern loneliness and disconnection. While Adam and Harry are haunted to different ends, together, they try to push past pain and into something new.
An everyday, real romance – even with the ghosts
Chances are, many who see All of Us Strangers will enter the cinema with pre-conceptions of Scott and Mescal.
Both have become internet heart-throbs through zeitgeist-shaping roles on hit TV shows: Scott as the Hot Priest in Fleabag; Mescal as Connell in Normal People. Clearly bruised, Adam and Harry might not be as easy to crush on as viewers, but the characters soon open up to each other.
"It starts as a physical attraction," says Mescal. "They both want to have sex. But what I love about their relationship is that it feels very attainable to me from a real-life context. There are no big sweeping romantic gestures. And yet, the film is absolutely romantic.
Loading..."All these characters do is listen to each other and are there for each other. And that on paper sounds so simple. I think that's what the film was trying to say, that to love with courage sounds so simple on paper, but it's utterly radical and requires a huge amount of bravery. What they give to each other is their company, their total focus and attention."
Scott says the characters really see each other, and that leads to a lovely sense of intimacy.
"The most pleasurable things to shoot were where you see them enjoying the small things in life. Just having a shower or being asleep [together] – the tiny things that are so beautiful and wonderful to experience," he says.
"And that's even more of a balm for them because they haven't had it before."
Good grief
With this new intimacy, what flows out is the chance to express their hurt; for the first time, they both articulate a shared sense of grief.
Scott notes that grief comes in many forms, but we're not often taught about the minutiae of it, or given the tools for dealing with the trauma, agitation or feeling that you've been betrayed by the universe.
"Grief is such a… it's such a difficult thing to quantify and to categorise in some ways. I don't think necessarily that grief is always related to death or the loss of life," he says.
"We experience grief much more than we can recognise; the end of a relationship or the end of a phase of your life, or just something where you think, 'I don't have that anymore, and I can never get it back'.
"I think that's how I would quantify grief over sadness, something that is a place to which I can never return…."
Adam's ability to return home (filmed in director Haigh's childhood home, the current owner's décor luckily frozen in amber from the 80s) is enviable to anyone who has lost a parent. It's a mystical healing fantasy, where he's able to tell his parents the things he never got the chance to before they died.
Despite the immense pain of losing both his parents as a child, the film has a visceral hope that's threaded throughout; catharsis and grace can be found through connecting with others.
Mescal had first-hand experience with pain, fear and grief while filming when his mother became very ill and was then diagnosed with cancer.
"I wasn't able to process it at the time, but my body was processing it in kind of real-time," Mescal explains, adding that she is in remission and "is doing great now".
"Like in the scene when Andrew talks about the death of his mother — I was just going to work thinking I was fine. But something that I've learned about grief is that it's a physical thing and you can say that you're fine in your head, but it has to manifest itself."
Scott adds: "It's the expression 'the body keeps the score' — that's so true."
At one point, his character's grief does overwhelm his body, in a dancefloor release that becomes a nightmare as bumps of ketamine open the valve. He aches for days afterwards, less a comedown than an emotional hangover.
"Say whatever you want, but your body will tell you the truth."
All of Us Strangers is in cinemas January 18.