The new film from Anthony Chen takes a minute to find its rhythm. For the first hour or so of its admittedly substantial runtime, I couldn’t help but wonder if an LLM, prompted to make the most normcore script imaginable, would be able to conjure a story of such modest simplicity. Stick with it a minute, however, and We Are All Strangers reveals itself to be a film with the ambitions of Edward Yang: which is to say that, barring a lightly insane final act, it attempts to tell the story of a place at a specific point in time through the mundane but universal experiences—all the marriages, births, deaths, and trips to McDonalds—of the regular people who live there.
It’s an aspirational, commendable approach that produces a variety of results—everything from lightly transcendental moments to bouts of extreme kitsch. There are sequences in which Chen appears to mimic the aesthetic of a hotel or beer advertisements, but even in these, the director so consistently strives for a kind of emotional purity that it continually won me over. In one scene, we’re treated to a full-blown TikTok-ready song-and-dance number at a couple’s wedding. In another, a family gathers on a balcony to take in the fireworks during the country’s diamond jubilee. We Are All Strangers asks much of its audience (in terms of both time and cringy discomfort), but if you went into the film with zero knowledge of this place, you’d leave with, I think, an emotional idea of it—nothing if not an old-school cinema transaction.
Chen first broke onto the scene when his debut feature, Ilo Ilo, won the Camera d’Or at Cannes in 2013. Strangers is his sixth, but he’s positioned it as the overdue end of a spiritual trio (dubbed the Growing Up trilogy) that began there and continued through Wet Season in 2019. In the intervening years, he made Drift, which was set in Greece, and The Breaking Ice, which was set in China. This latest feels as much a homecoming as a love letter: a panoramic snapshot of the city state packed to the brim with bustling street scenes, towering apartment blocks, and late-night drinks on public squares—the kind of film that Chen would be within his rights to call Once Upon a Time in Singapore.
The central narrative is as old as time. We’re first introduced to Boon Kiat (a soulful Andi Lim), the proprietor of a modest noodle joint that neighbors a beer stall where a Malaysian woman, Bee Hwa (Yeo Yann Yann), waits tables for a dwindling clientele. Simultaneously, we meet Boon’s son, Junyang (Koh Jia Ler), a high-school dropout who’s about to enlist in the army and fallen in love with Lydia (Regene Lim), the daughter of a wealthy woman. A couple of years later after being discharged (this thing moves fast), Lydia becomes pregnant with his child, and so the young couple get hitched just as a newly smitten Bee Hwa and Boon also tie the knot. Soon, this unlikely foursome (with a baby in tow) find themselves living under the same roof just as the country is set to mark its 60th anniversary.
The role of protagonist, if there is one, is shared between Junyang—who we get to see try his hand a number of professions, including delivery driver and condo salesman—and Bee Hwa, a duo who share no blood but whose destinies Chen will eventually intertwine. This only becomes apparent in the madcap final third when, without giving too much away, Junyang decides to start hustling pharmaceuticals in order to appease a group of loan sharks. Both characters are played by actors who appeared in all three of Chen’s Growing Up series. Koh was just 12 years old when he appeared in Ilo Ilo and, since then, the actor has never appeared in another film outside of Chen’s. In an interview provided for critics before the Berlinale competition premiere (a first for a Singaporean filmmaker), Chen explained that he felt a duty to work with him again and explore his experiences of going out in the world—a sense of kinship that’s deeply felt, even given Koh’s understandable limitations as an actor.
Names as lofty as Yang’s should, of course, only be invoked with extreme delicacy. Chen would likely be the first person to tell you that We Are All Strangers is not in the same league as the Taiwanese master’s work, but I wasn’t at all surprised to learn the director listed A Brighter Summer Day at the top of his 2022 poll for Sight and Sound. This movie is often goofy and trite and probably earnest to a fault, but it made me laugh and almost cry and I was gripped until the very end.
We Are All Strangers premiered at the 2026 Berlinale.