Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott’s upcoming ‘All Of Us Strangers’ sounds intense, explicit and super gay

Earlier this month, we got our first look at one of the fall’s most anticipated movies, All Of Us Strangers, directed by Andrew Haigh starring Paul Mescal and out actor Andrew Scott.

Now, Haigh is the talented queer auteur behind award-winning dramas like 45 Years, the sizzling gay romance Weekend, and many of your favorites episodes of HBO’s Looking, so his involvement was reason enough to get excited about the film.

However, one big, glaring question about All Of Us Strangers remained: Is it gay???

Here’s what the official synopsis told us: “The story of a screenwriter (Scott) who, after an encounter with his neighbor (Mescal), is pulled back to his childhood home where he discovers that his long-dead parents (Jamie Bell and Claire Foy) are living and look the same age as the day they died.”

Oooh, intriguing! But also…. extremely vague.

An “encounter” with his neighbor? Of the sexual (or even romantic) variety? We were left with no concrete answers; not to mention the film’s source novel—Taichi Yamada’s Strangers—was decidedly concerned with heterosexual characters.

But, a new preview in Vanity Fair confirms what we’d been hoping to hear: Yes, a crackling romance between Scott and Mescal’s characters factors significantly into the narrative of All Of Us Strangers—as does their physical connection, which is described as sweet, deep, and explicit.

As the piece notes, sex has been an important piece of most all of Haigh’s work, and his latest will be no different, dedicating a lot of time to the flirty-hookup-turned-tender romance between Scott’s protagonist, Adam, and his beguiling neighbor, Harry, played by Mescal.

But the filmmaker says he approached sex in this film differently than he has previously: “I’ve been more objective in how I’ve shot sex scenes in the past,” Haigh tells Vanity Fair. “Here, I really wanted to feel the subjective nature of having sex and what it feels like—the nervousness and the excitement and the physical sensation of being touched by someone else, and what that does to you.”

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“Let’s just say he’s not called the Hot Priest for nothing.”

Haigh notes that Scott and Mescal were “fearless” in bringing that intention to life, committing themselves “wholly” to the intense sexual chemistry of their characters. We all fell in love with Scott as the “Hot Priest” in Fleabag, so we can’t wait to see the out actor give his all as a queer romantic lead and Mescal, well… you know how we feel about the king of short-shorts…

Forgive us: We got so caught up in steamy sex scenes that we basically glossed over the other half of All Of Us Strangers‘ story: The fact that, amid this exciting new romance, Adam is drawn to his childhood home where he’s surprised to find his long-dead parents still reside, looking not a single bit older than the day they past.

Spooky! That fantastical premise makes it clear that Haigh’s film doesn’t abide by the typical laws of time and physics, but don’t call it a ghost story (“Weekend with ghosts,” it is not, jokes the Vanity Fair piece).

It doesn’t take long for Adam to embrace his surreal encounters with his parents, and the unique circumstances of their new bond—he’s now older than they both were when they died—coincides with the personal, queer themes at the heart of All Of Us Strangers, like the fact that Adam has to confront his long-buried shame and do something he assumed he’d never have to: come out to his parents.

It’s said that both this supernaturally twinged family drama and the hot-and-heavy romance “deftly coexist in a kind of metaphysical harmony.” Together, it sounds like they’ll make for a film unlike one we’ve ever seen—and immediately All Of Us Strangers becomes a must-see.

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All Of Us Strangers is set to make its bow at the New York Film Festival, which runs from September 29 to October 5. After that, the film heads to theaters everywhere on December 22. Check out a few more first-look images below.