Escaping grief in the dreamscapes of ‘Mulholland Drive’ and ‘All of Us Strangers’
Dreams have been a cinematic plot device since the dawn of film, often to maddening ends. The classic trope of wrapping up a chaotic plot by revealing that it was all a dream is one of the laziest and most unsatisfying cop-outs a filmmaker can turn to, but there are plenty of other ways to incorporate dreams into a movie that don’t feel like a bait-and-switch.
David Lynch is perhaps the best-known director to incorporate dreams into his work. He often uses them to complicate a story rather than simplify it, blurring the lines between reality, fantasy, and hallucination. His dream sequences are so unnerving and unpredictable that his films often feel like horror movies, even when they have none of the hallmarks of the genre except a general sense of dread.
In 2023’s All of Us Strangers, Andrew Haigh delved into surreality in a similar manner, creating a movie that bears striking similarities to Lynch’s 2001 film Mulholland Drive. Both movies explore grief, guilt, love, and loneliness. Both feature main characters who venture into unexplained parallel realities to escape their pain. And both feature a similar, morbid revelation. The endings of both films are enigmatic and open to interpretation, but where Lynch’s movie concludes with the impossibility of living in two worlds, Haigh’s movie suggests that perhaps there is some resolution after all.
Mulholland Drive revolves around aspiring actor Betty Elms (Naomi Watts), who arrives in Hollywood and moves into her aunt’s empty apartment. There, she befriends Rita (Laura Harring), a young woman who has suffered from amnesia since a car accident. Eventually, the women become lovers as they try to piece together Rita’s identity. Partway through the film, however, it’s revealed that this story is all in Betty’s imagination. Betty’s real name is Diane, and she hired a hitman to kill “Rita” (whose real name is Camilla) when she discovers that Camilla is no longer interested in her romantically. Wracked with grief and guilt over the killing, Diane retreats into a fantasy world where she and Camilla can be together again.
All of Us Strangers, meanwhile, revolves around a screenwriter, Adam (Andrew Scott), who lives in a block of flats in London that is empty except for an upstairs neighbour named Harry (Paul Mescal). When Harry invites Adam to have a drink with him, he reluctantly agrees, and the two begin a passionate romance. At the same time, Adam begins visiting his childhood home, where his late parents are inexplicably alive despite having died in a car accident when he was a child. They are the same age they were when the accident happened, and Adam returns to them repeatedly to work through the pain of his childhood and the grief he suffered when they died.
The film adds another layer of complexity to Lynch’s set-up. In All of Us Strangers, the alternate world of Adam’s childhood home is a clear divergence from reality, while his romance with Harry is portrayed as the real world. As Adam grows more comfortable expressing his feelings and being seen with Harry in public, however, he begins to lose touch with reality, collapsing in a nightclub and becoming unable to distinguish between dreams and the waking world.
At the end of the film, Adam realises that he needs to put his grief behind him and let his parents go so that he can move on with his new life. After saying a final goodbye, he returns to Harry’s apartment and knocks on the door. What he finds is a cold, unlit flat and an overpowering stench. Walking into the bedroom, he finds Harry’s decomposing body, which, it is implied, has been there since the night he asked Adam to join him for a drink. Contrary to Adam’s fantasy, he had refused the invitation, and Harry had gone back to his own apartment and died.
In Mulholland Drive, “Betty” makes a similar discovery. As she and “Rita” search for Rita’s identity, they visit an apartment where they think she might have lived with a friend. When they enter the apartment, they are met with an overwhelming stench and enter the bedroom to find the decomposing corpse of Diane, who, it is revealed at the end of the film, kills herself when she can no longer maintain her fantasy world.
In All of Us Strangers, Adam doesn’t kill himself. Instead, he retreats again into his fantasy world. After his body is discovered, Harry appears alive again, upset that Adam has seen him in that state. Adam consoles him, and they return to his flat, where they hold each other as if they were both still alive.
It’s difficult to say whether this is a “happier” ending than Diane’s suicide at the end of Mulholland Drive, especially since audiences have interpreted it in so many ways. Some viewers even question whether Adam died at the beginning of the film along with Harry. However, Haigh’s work is unabashedly and miraculously poignant rather than disorienting and morbid. Instead of deconstructing the warped underbelly of Hollywood, it explores love, stigma, and finding a connection in a world governed by loneliness.
There may be plenty of unanswered questions about the ending of the film, but its final shot – Adam and Harry in bed together vanishing slowly into the night sky as Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s song “The Power of Love” plays – suggests connection is the overriding conclusion rather than the cold, hard futility at the end of Mulholland Drive.
Both films explore the possibility of escaping grief and guilt through fantasy, but while Mulholland Drive concludes with the unbearable wait of maintaining the dream, All of Us Strangers suggests that there is still some redemption to be found in an alternate reality, even when you’ve come to terms with the truth.
