“A knot here, all the time”: Metaleptische verstrengelingen en/als queer melancholie in All of Us Strangers (2023)
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2025-08-26
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en
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All of Us Strangers (2023) by Andrew Haigh is a melancholic meditation on queerness, loneliness, love, and death. This thesis centres on the motive of the knot, exploring how it is expressive of queer melancholia and the (im)possibility of queer love within heteronormative discourse. Entanglements not only encapsulate the film’s thematic core, but also determine its narrative structure. Formally, the film ties together seemingly incompatible realities and temporalities through the trope of ontological metalepsis, staging instances where past and present, reality and imagination, life and death converge. Combining insights from queer studies, psychoanalytic theory, and narratology, this study reparatively reads the metaleptic-as-melancholic knot as a potentiality for queer relationality. Whereas entanglements visualize the ongoing trauma of a homophobic past, they also allow for a hopeful re-interpretation of this past, rendering melancholia in itself a relational, transformational affect. By demonstrating how heteronormative narrative structures fail to recognize the reality and significance of queer desires, the knot emerges as a distinctively queer meaning-making strategy, mobilizing the “impossible” and “unnatural” to manifest queer love as both thinkable and affectively “real”.
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