Anthony Chen—along with Eric Khoo and Yeo Siew Hua—is one of the most influential filmmakers in contemporary Singaporean cinema. 13 years ago he made a scintillating debut with Ilo Ilo, the Camera d’Or winner at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival. Set in 1997, it gave a close look into the life of a middle class couple trying to cope with the Asian financial crisis even as the pregnant wife deals with her growing jealousy toward the new Filipino house help and her special bond with her 10-year-old son.

Six years later the actors playing the mother and son—Yann Yann Yeo and Jia Ler Koh—found their way into Chen’s second film, Wet Season (2019), as a teacher and student whose affection for each other grows in the face of the emptiness in their lives till things take a forbidden turn.

Now, seven years on Yann Yann Yeo and Jia Ler Koh reunite yet again in the third and last of Chen’s “Growing Up” trilogy, We Are All Strangers, as a stepmother and son thrown together in a joint family due to each of their adverse circumstances.

We Are All Strangers comes full circle, that too in a distinctively piquant way with the cooking of Hokkien mee (fried Hokkien noodles) in a hawker centre. However, the pair of hands preparing the dish changes, with the recipe, food stall and business becoming  a metaphor for generational legacy that owns people, much as they may try to evade it.

There’s something extremely relatable about the situation that emerges when members of three disparate households get together under one roof. If one borrows the title of a popular Hindi soap, it’s kahaani ghar ghar ki (Every house has its own story). At the core is the father-son duo of the kind, upright and committed Boon Kiat (Andi Lim) and the uncaring, aimless Junyang (Jia Ler Koh). Their modest home is forced to expand when the unplanned pregnancy of his privileged girlfriend Lydia (Regene Lim) has her marry Junyang and move in. Things turn more fractious when Bee Hwa (Yann Yann Yeo), the hostess in the adjacent stall, the “Beer Aunty” who Boon Kiat has affection for, faces problems with her sister-in-law, accepts his proposal and joins as his wife and the fourth member of the home.

The film, which had its world premiere in Berlin earlier, is now playing at the Toronto International Film Festival. It doesn’t surprise you with anything new. The slice of life that it offers has been seen and experienced before, both on and off screen. The class divides, materialism, ambitions, financial precarity, tenuous ties, love, longing, loneliness and loss, the maturity and fortitude with which you deal with them, the understanding and acceptance that you have for the flaws of others and the perseverance with which you carry on is the circle of life that doesn’t just govern the structure of the film but also underscores the coming-of age theme that it's all about.

We Are All Strangers does have a protracted narrative but the very languor is also the film’s calling card, resembling the ways of life, the long stretches when nothing might seem to happen leading on to the sudden shifts that can break your spirit and the hope that manages to persist against all odds. Chen treats his characters with empathy despite their failings eliciting compassion for them in the audience as well. The ensemble is effortlessly plugged into each other with Yann Yann Yeo and Andi Lim upping the poignancy quotient.

Some scenes and moments reach out, especially the tender ones depicting the ardour of the young as opposed to the autumnal romance of the elders. Most interesting is the Singapore that the film brings to life. Not the shining red dot of the rich and the famous, the neat and clean, gentrified world of the expatriates or of the brand-loving crowd that throngs the malls but the one struggling to eke a living at hawker centres, living in HDB flats than gated condos, buying stuff at the wet markets, dating on public bus rides and travelling in MRT. “Singapore has so much money, why don’t I have any?” says Bee Hwa. We All Are Strangers captures such realities of life that jab at your dreams and the personal turbulence that is turned inscrutable by civic stability.