‘We Are All Strangers’ review: Anthony Chen’s involving drama charts generational tensions in contemporary Singapore

Dir/scr: Anthony Chen. Singapore. 2026. 157mins

Singaporean writer-director Anthony Chen rounds off an unofficial ‘Growing Up’ trilogy in his Berlinale Competition title We Are All Strangers. As well as connecting thematically with his 2013 debut Ilo Ilo and 2019’s Wet Season, We Are All Strangers is a densely patterned family story and a socioeconomic state-of-the-nation portrait of Singapore today.

 Fine performances and sharply structured accessibility 

This involving, if slightly over-extended, drama isn’t afraid to tug the heartstrings or to hit certain notes that you can see coming miles ahead. But it is an intelligent film in a mode of Asian domestic drama thematically adjacent to such auteurs as Hirokazu Kore-eda and Edward Yang. Like its predecessors, the film should enjoy a healthy festival run, and fine performances and sharply structured accessibility could attract appeal in art-house niches beyond the Asian mainstream.

Focusing on a quartet of characters who find themselves coming into tight and uneasy proximity, the film begins with noodle chef Boon Kiat (Andi Lim) frying up the dish of the day in the bar he runs. Widowed and hard-working, Boon Kiat lives with his 21-year-old son Junyang (Koh Jia Ler), a dedicated slacker reluctant to think about what he will do after his mandatory army service. Junyang has his eye on some vague internet-derived dream of la dolce vita – unlike girlfriend Lydia (Regene Lim), a serious-minded secondary school student and promising pianist. But after the young couple’s tryst at a luxury hotel – depicted in a manic Instagram-style montage – she becomes pregnant, and her stern middle-class mother insists that Boon Kiat stump up for a wedding celebration.

Lydia’s academic and musical future now on hold, the young couple move into Boon Kiat’s spartan apartment. So does Bee Hwa (Yeo Yann Yann), a drinks waitress in Boon Kiat’s café. She initially seems a cynical, seen-it-all type, but Boon Kiat begins a shy courtship of her, and the two marry. Now there are four in Boon Kiat’s apartment, with the baby soon making five. Junyang needs to find work, but a seemingly surefire real estate gig and increasingly farcical livestreaming venture both have dire results.

The troubles pile up, both because of the boy’s fecklessness and because of social change. On one hand, there is what the film presents as the baleful influence of the internet and pop culture. On the other hand, there is Singapore itself, enjoying an economic boom 60 years after independence – but also shown as keeping the hard-pressed working class in its place and foreigners like Malaysian immigrant Bee Hwa at the margins.

Chen adroitly skips between character strands, pursuing a narrative logic that seems inexorable rather than merely predictable, as the family’s woes pile up with tragic momentum. A cyclical dimension comes into play, not least through the casting once again of Koh, who made his debut aged 11 in Chen’s autobiographically inspired Ilo Ilo, then returned in Wet Season. Also back, in her third Chen feature, is Yeo Yann Yann, who played Koh’s mother in Ilo Ilo, and here plays stepmother to a manchild desperately trying to dodge adulthood.

Yeo’s Bee Hwa is by far the most interesting character here, her background never fully sketched in although it is clear she has weathered a few storms. Yeo vividly and poignantly conveys this apparent cynic’s embrace of a more grounded respectability and responsibility, and also brings out the enduring mischief that must surely land Bee Hwa in deep water. Seasoned TV actor Andi Lim makes a belated big-screen debut, holding the film’s moral centre as the stout-hearted paterfamilias and dispenser of moral wisdom – making Boon Kiat more sympathetic than the archetype suggests.

These vivid performances nicely offset the film’s tendency to schematic moralise about false values. So do its high production values, with DoP Teoh Gay Hian and designer Huang Mei-Ching playing realism against high gloss, sometimes of a deliberately sleek and superficial kind – as in the luxury condo Junyang attempts to sell, or a bizarrely flashy wedding reception dance number. Singapore’s skyline forms an imposing sweep of backdrop that contrasts with the cramped reality of the characters’ everyday world.