Poignant conclusion to Chen’s Growing Up Trilogy that tugs at the heartstrings and makes you fully understand the many faces of Singapore across class, landscape, and lives.

Duration: 157 minutes

There are few filmmakers who have captured Singapore quite like Anthony Chen. Across Ilo Ilo, Wet Season and now We Are All Strangers, his vision of the country has remained remarkably clear: not simply the Singapore of gleaming skylines and global ambition, but the Singapore of HDB corridors, hawker stalls, crowded buses, family obligations, low-paying jobs, cramped homes and the small, often unnoticed pleasures that make life bearable. Fourteen years after Ilo Ilo first introduced us to that world, Chen returns with the final chapter of his Growing Up trilogy, and the result feels like a coming of age not only for the characters he has carried with him, but for the filmmaker himself, and perhaps even the country he has spent his career observing.

If Ilo Ilo was a young filmmaker discovering the emotional possibilities of home, and Wet Season a more assured one examining its fractures, We Are All Strangers arrives in Chen’s forties with a more complicated kind of tenderness: he sees a Singapore that has become more expensive, more unequal, more ambitious and more globally recognisable, yet remains deeply attentive to the ordinary lives unfolding beneath that polished surface. It is a sprawling portrait of people growing older, taking on responsibility, learning to live with disappointment and discovering that happiness can sometimes be found in the smallest of things.

As arduous as it sounds, its length is important. Chen goes beyond just telling us a story, and wants his audiences to feel and inhabit his Singapore. He gives his characters time to eat, work, commute, argue, wait, make mistakes and discover moments of happiness that might otherwise be cut away in a more conventional drama. The film opens with humble labour in a hawker stall kitchen, where Hokkien mee is prepared with careful repetition: prawns peeled, noodles tossed, heat and oil moving in rhythm. It is an ordinary act of work, but Chen films it with the attention of something almost sacred. From there, the film keeps widening, moving through hawker centres and army camps, the CBD and Marina Bay Sands, buses and McDonald’s, hospital beds and prison visiting rooms, National Day fireworks and the interiors of both condo showrooms and humble homes. Singapore is not merely the setting. It is the film’s great unspoken character, a country of immense contradictions, where wealth and precarity, aspiration and exhaustion, privilege and struggle, old ways and rapid change all exist side by side.

All of it comes together to showcase a contradictory Singapore to what most foreigners might envision: a city of immense wealth and rising costs, gleaming global ambition and ordinary exhaustion, privilege and precarity, stability and constant change. Chen never turns those contrasts into a simplistic rich-versus-poor argument. Instead, he lets them coexist. The two weddings at the heart of the film are perhaps the clearest example. One is lavish, staged against the backdrop of wealth and aspiration, while the other is smaller, almost improvised, rooted in the texture of everyday survival. Yet neither is presented as the “right” kind of happiness. Both contain joy. Both contain anxiety. Both are families trying, in their own ways, to make something work. Chen understands that the contradictions of Singapore are not competing versions of the country; they are the country.

That same idea is embedded in the four central characters. Koh Jia Ler’s Junyang is the most literal expression of the film’s coming-of-age theme. Having dropped out of school and drifted through life with a happy-go-lucky confidence, he’s spent much of his youth being protected by the adults around him. When things go wrong, someone else tends to absorb the consequences. His immaturity is never played simply for comedy or condemnation. Jia Ler gives him a defensive swagger that often feels like a boy pretending to be a man, and what makes the performance so affecting is that adulthood doesn’t arrive as a sudden transformation. It is forced upon him, piece by piece: through a shotgun wedding, precarious work, bad decisions, debt and the realisation that the people who have always saved him cannot keep doing so forever. Eventually, he becomes a father himself. There is something quietly profound in watching the boy who once needed protecting become responsible for protecting someone else.

For anyone who remembers Jia Ler as the mischievous child in Ilo Ilo, there is an additional layer of poignancy in watching him here. The actor has quite literally grown up alongside Chen’s trilogy, and there are moments when you can still glimpse that child beneath the adult he has become. Chen doesn’t erase that boyishness, instead letting it remain, gradually tempered by consequence. Junyang’s journey is not about becoming a perfect man. It is about understanding that growing up means accepting responsibility even when nobody else can shield you from the consequences.

And then, Yeo Yann Yann’s Bee Hwa provides a perfect counterpoint to Junyang. If Junyang has spent much of his life protected from hardship, Bee Hwa has spent hers learning how to survive it. She works, worries, calculates and endures, carrying herself with the sharpness of someone who has never had the luxury of assuming that things will simply work out. Yeo plays her with an extraordinary accumulation of small gestures: humour that barely conceals exhaustion, irritation that masks vulnerability, and moments of silence that say more than any dramatic outburst could. Yet Bee Hwa’s arc goes beyond suffering alone, and ends up being about discovering that happiness does not always have to be earned through survival. After spending so much of her life doing what needs to be done, she begins to realise that there can be pleasure in the small things too.

That is where Andi Lim’s Boon Kiat becomes so important. He is almost the opposite of Junyang: steady, simple and decent, a man who has built his life around work and responsibility without asking for very much in return. But the Singapore around him is changing. It is becoming more expensive and complicated than the life he has built can comfortably accommodate, and there is something quietly devastating in watching a man who has done everything he knows to do discover that stability itself is no longer quite enough. Andi plays him with remarkable restraint, letting affection emerge through small pauses and gestures rather than grand declarations. His relationship with Bee Hwa is consequently one of the film’s sweetest surprises. It is a romance built not from sweeping gestures, but from proximity, shared labour and the gradual act of making space for another person in a life that has never had much room to spare.

Regene Lim’s Lydia, meanwhile, offers another fascinating contrast. Coming from privilege, she has a different relationship with uncertainty, and her ability to adapt gives her a quiet strength that initially sits in the background of the story. She is not simply the ambitious girlfriend or the catalyst for Junyang’s transition into adulthood. Having grown up without a father herself, she understands absence in a way that he does not, and she carries her own independence without needing to announce it. Regene gives the character a controlled confidence that makes her feel like someone who has already begun to understand what Junyang is only starting to learn: that adulthood is less about having everything figured out than about learning how to live with what you cannot control.

If Jia Ler and Yeo Yann Yann steal the film emotionally, it is because their characters sit at opposite ends of this question of growing up. He must learn responsibility; she must learn that life can contain joy. One has been protected from consequences; the other has spent her life absorbing them. And yet both eventually arrive at a similar understanding: that happiness is rarely found in some grand resolution. It exists in the small spaces between everything else.

Nowhere is this more beautifully expressed than in one of the film’s simplest scenes. Bee Hwa is standing on a crowded public bus when she takes out an apple given to her by Boon Kiat and begins to eat it, after exchanging a few saccharine texts. That’s it. Just a woman on a bus, eating an apple someone she cares about has given her. Beyond all the weddings, debt, childbirth, illness and family conflict that fill the film, this tiny gesture becomes one of its most emotionally resonant moments. Chen has always understood that ordinary life contains its own poetry, but here he seems to crystallise the entire philosophy of his cinema into one piece of fruit: there is beauty in being thought of, in being cared for, in being given something small that makes an otherwise ordinary day a little better.

Of course, almost cruelly, Chen emotionally devastates us in the scene that follows. That juxtaposition is essential to We Are All Strangers. Chen understands that happiness does not cancel out hardship, just as hardship does not erase happiness. Life is not neatly divided into good scenes and bad scenes; often the most painful moments arrive immediately after the most joyful ones. The apple matters precisely because it is fleeting. The film allows us to feel the pleasure of that moment without promising that it will last. That is adulthood, family and perhaps Singapore itself: an accumulation of small joys carried alongside the knowledge that nothing stays still for very long.

It is also why the film’s 157-minute runtime ultimately feels justified. Chen wants us to stay long enough for these moments to accumulate. He wants us to feel the weight of time passing, not simply be told that these characters have changed. We watch people live in their spaces, move through the city, make compromises and slowly adjust themselves around one another. Four adults and a newborn eventually find themselves sharing a cramped HDB flat, and the resulting family is constructed under pressure rather than by any clean definition of who belongs to whom. Space tightens, money moves unevenly, responsibilities shift and relationships have to adapt. Family here is not simply inherited or chosen; sometimes it is something you build because life has put you in the same room and asks you to figure it out.

This is perhaps where Chen’s Singaporean vision is at its most powerful. He doesn’t appear interested in telling us whether Singapore is good or bad, whether it has become too expensive or too successful, whether the old ways were better or the new ones are inevitable. Instead, he holds all of these contradictions in the frame. Marina Bay Sands can co-exist in the same film as a hawker stall without being diametrically opposed. A lavish wedding can exist beside a modest one. A property transaction can change someone’s life while another person is worrying about paying off debts Someone can livestream products for extra income while another person works silently in a kitchen. The Singaporean experience is not one single story, and Chen’s great achievement is that he does not flatten it into one.

Perhaps this is why the film feels so much like the culmination of his Growing Up trilogy. Fourteen years ago, Ilo Ilo introduced us to a filmmaker in his late twenties looking closely at family, care and class. Wet Season came from a filmmaker in his thirties, more assured in his craft and more interested in loneliness, identity and the complicated relationships people form when the structures around them begin to fail. Now, in his early forties, Chen gives us a film that seems to understand that growing up is not simply about becoming older. It is about learning to live with contradictions.

Over the course of the trilogy, so much has changed, from Anthony Chen himself, to Jia Ler, to Yann Yann. And so has Singapore. The country in We Are All Strangers is more expensive, more unequal, more ambitious and more globally recognisable than the one Chen first filmed. Yet he remains fascinated by the same things: the way people eat, commute, work, fall in love, raise children, worry about money and quietly look after one another. His gaze has become more mature, but not colder. If anything, there is more tenderness here because he is no longer trying to idealise home. He can love Singapore and be frustrated by it at the same time. He can see the inequalities and the compromises while still finding beauty in a bus ride through the heartlands, fireworks seen from an HDB corridor, a shared meal, a wedding, an apple.

Chen has spent his career refusing to choose between affection and honesty. He has poured so much of his heart into showing not just what Singapore looks like, but what it might feel like to live here now: the pressure, the aspirations, the disappointments, the compromises, the absurdity, the warmth and the tiny joys that keep people going. For international audiences, it is an unusually intimate portrait of a country often reduced to its skyline and efficiency. For Singaporeans, there is something even more affecting about recognising ourselves in all the places Chen chooses to look.

By the end of We Are All Strangers, you feel as though you have lived several lifetimes alongside these people. You have watched them grow, fail, hurt one another, forgive one another, fall in love and learn that responsibility rarely arrives at a convenient time. You have also watched a filmmaker grow up alongside his country, moving from the tenderness of youth into the more complicated acceptance of middle age.

On final reflection, the film’s Chinese title carries such beautiful resonance: 我们不是陌生人 — “We Are Not Strangers.” The English title suggests alienation. The Chinese title then corrects it. After an evening spent at the cinema watching these characters collide, accommodate one another and eventually make room for one another, that correction feels entirely earned. Because Anthony Chen was never really been making films about strangers. He has been making films about how we learn to belong, to our families, to one another, and to this strange, complicated, beautiful place we call home.

We Are All Strangers opens in Singapore cinemas from 20th August 2026, such as Golden Village

Read our interview with Anthony Chen here

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