Green, M. (2025) Sound in the Crystal of ‘All of Us Strangers’ (2023). Presented at: Music and the Moving Image Conference, May 30-June 1, 2025, New York University, USA.

This paper examines the soundtrack of All of Us Strangers (2023), directed by Andrew Haigh and considered here as a ‘subjective realist’ drama (Campora, 2014). The film follows Adam, a forty-something playwright who, while attempting to write about his traumatic past, begins to encounter his deceased parents. At the same time, the usually reserved Adam starts a relationship with his downstairs neighbour, Harry. Both journeys are marked by grief, but through them, Adam finds resolution, self-acceptance, and the strength to love and be loved.

The paper approaches All of Us Strangers as a Deleuzian crystal-image film, characterised by the ambiguous co-presence of actual and virtual, past and present, and real and imaginary. Adam’s encounters with his deceased parents, though presented as vividly real, cannot be, and within these scenes, time and space collapse. Adam’s relationship with Harry, especially toward the film’s end, exhibits similar tendencies.

The analysis focuses on the soundtrack’s role in setting actual and virtual in relation and destabilising their boundaries, examining its contribution to the film’s hyalosigns and the formation of its overall crystalline state. Central to this analysis is the interplay of sound effects and music (Kulezic-Wilson, 2019). This paper engages with Karaduman’s 2022 article on ‘crystal sounds’, but approaches sound more broadly, within a work where the crystal-image defines the whole narrative.