10 Terrible Plot Twists From Otherwise Awesome Movies
2. All Of Us Strangers - Harry Is Also A Ghost
This one goes into the category of 'Great Movie, Garbage Ending'.
A surreal ghost story that'll provoke floods of tears rather than screams, All of Us Strangers follows a lonely screenwriter named Adam (Andrew Scott) as he spends time with the ghosts of his parents, who died in a car crash when he was 12. During this time, Andrew also forms a relationship with Harry (Paul Mescal), another resident in Adam's apartment block. Visually stunning, beautifully acted, and crushingly emotional, All of Us Strangers is a terrific piece of cinema... right up until the final five minutes, in which it's revealed that Harry is also a ghost. He died in his flat near the beginning of the movie, having drunk himself to death.
In his legendary book on screenwriting, Save the Cat, author Blake Snyder described a rule called the Double Mumbo Jumbo. Essentially, audiences will just accept one piece of magic per movie. That's very much the issue here - suddenly throwing in another ghost at the very end was too much, and in a film that's already seriously sad, Harry's fate just felt cruel.
Honestly, this twist makes the prospect of revisiting All of Us Strangers far less appealing. The concept of Adam seeing his parents' ghosts feels less special now that there were multiple ghosts all along, and it'll be harder to watch Adam and Harry falling in love and being intimate knowing that one of them is actually dead.