Andrew Haigh’s upcom­ing Strangers makes lovers of Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal

Last fall, the wide­ly-crushed-upon Paul Mescal sent his legions of admir­ers into parox­ysms with the news that he’d play oppo­site Josh O’Connor in an upcom­ing romance set around World War II, to be direct­ed by Oliv­er Her­manus. The Mescal hype train has con­tin­ued rolling, with the actor scor­ing an avalanche of fresh crit­i­cal acclaim for two stand­out films at Cannes in the Irish-set dra­ma God’s Crea­tures and the sum­mer hol­i­day qua­si-mem­oir After­sun, and now he’s going to set hearts aflame once again by pair­ing up with anoth­er Irish dreamboat.

Vari­ety ran an item last night announc­ing that Mescal would star along­side Andrew Scott (best known for either his tenure as Fleabag’s hot priest, his time spent as sec­ond banana to Sher­lock Holmes, or his exten­sive and illus­tri­ous stage career) in Strangers, a new film from Andrew Haigh. And because this is Haigh we’re talk­ing about, one of his country’s pre­em­i­nent queer writer-direc­tors, we may read between the lines of the vague syn­op­sis and pre­sume that these char­ac­ters will fall in love with one another.

Vari­ety pro­vides a rather abstract sum­ma­ry of the upcom­ing adap­ta­tion of a nov­el by Taichi Yama­da, com­bin­ing the love sto­ry with some­thing clos­er to the para­nor­mal: ​“Strangers fol­lows screen­writer Adam (Scott) who, one night in his near-emp­ty tow­er block in con­tem­po­rary Lon­don, has a chance encounter with his mys­te­ri­ous neigh­bor Har­ry (Mescal) that punc­tures the rhythm of his every­day life. As Adam and Har­ry get clos­er, Adam is pulled back to his child­hood home where he dis­cov­ers that his long-dead par­ents ([Claire] Foy and [Jamie] Bell) are both liv­ing and look the same age as the day they died over 30 years ago.”

Though Haigh’s ven­tured into genre ter­ri­to­ry with his most recent work, the TV series The North Water, it seems that his next project will return him to the thorny two-han­der romances with which he’s most iden­ti­fied. Both Week­end and 45 Years explored con­flict­ed attrac­tions between peo­ple who can’t bare to vocal­ize the intense emo­tions rag­ing with­in them, and based on the non­com­mit­tal lan­guage above, Mescal and Scott may very well spend more time pin­ing for the unspeak­able than get­ting it.

Even if that’s the case, those moon­ing over either kind­ly-eyed actor will sure­ly have plen­ty to gawk at as they resolve their inner tur­moils against a back­drop of today’s Eng­land. Whether mak­ing a move on one anoth­er or mere­ly exchang­ing glances of furtive long­ing, the eye con­tact alone will be enough to jel­li­fy fans by the thousands.