Here
Here

Rating *** A must-see

Directed by Bas Devos
Directed by Robert Zemeckis

It’s nothing new to have films with the exact same title within a few years of each other, an only mildly less amusing variation on the confluence of two films with similar subject matter coming out at the same time. There have been no fewer than three films in the past five years to have the English title of Limbo, and two films named Dogman have competed in major film festivals in the last six; film critic Neil Young has even utilized the Twitter hashtag #ThisTitleIsTaken to note the eternal recurrence of titles such as Home, Chaos, and Eden. Such dubbings point as firmly to the undying relevance of the themes they evoke (for better or worse), but it also suggests a desire for a flexible mind on the part of the viewer: many filmmakers might find it useful to outline but not relate the precise nature of the limbo or the home that their film will tackle.

What separates the latest and most potentially tantalizing iteration in this trend to date is, at least initially, the inevitability. When Here premiered at the Berlinale last year, and it became apparent that Cinema Guild would opt to release it in 2024, it seemed more and more likely that it would align with Here‘s release year. I thought of the idea of this review many months ago and, despite more than a half year separating the releases of Here and Here—along with 2024’s fellow travelers of Walter Salles’s Oscar contender I’m Still Here, the belated week-long run of Christopher Harris’s 2001 experimental film still/here, and various other films like Here After, I Like It Here, and You Can’t Stay Here–I endeavored to write about what may seem two entirely separate films solely linked by their names.

I want to stress that, though confusion and obfuscation are key aspects of reading this review, this is a sincere attempt to discuss two continuously generative films that hail from entirely different sources of inspiration and are aimed towards divergent affects. They also, coincidentally enough, come from two directors on the opposite end of their artistic careers and the spectrum of visibility. Here is the Belgian filmmaker Bas Devos’s fourth feature film, and is at best his second to make a breakthrough stateside. Each of his films—all low-budget works resolutely belonging to the arthouse—have incorporated celluloid in some way, even going so far as to involve 65mm for certain shots in his first two features, and they operate with a conscious miniaturist sensibility, all running under 90 minutes and dealing with individuals’ experiences of the city and people around them. By contrast, Here is Robert Zemeckis’s twenty-second feature film at the tail-end of a career full of whiz-bang Hollywood filmmaking, alternately acclaimed and despised technical experimentation, and curious reckonings—both purposeful and unconscious—with nostalgia for the American Century, even as it was still in progress. His oeuvre involves too many different digressions and periods to easily summarize, but it’s safe to say that, despite some abiding supporters (including myself), his level of critical and popular support at this time might be even below the few but largely glowing reviews that Devos has received.

Here has been characterized, largely accurately, as belonging to a new phase of Devos’s career after his first two notably pessimistic features Violet (2014) and Hellhole (2019). His third feature, the nocturnal city reverie Ghost Tropic, premiered a scant few months after the latter and heralded a much less harsh outlook, a shift to 16mm, and a greater incorporation of nature within the city of Brussels that has served as Devos’s primary location. Here, like its fellow Brussels-set films, is concerned with the immigrant experience in a less precarious sense than many contemporary works, using their enclaves and quotidian interactions to explore what it means to exist in a place that is both home and not home. Here‘s protagonists initially seem to embody these two separate mindsets: Stefan (Stefan Gota) is a Romanian construction worker preparing to return to his native country on holiday, though he may his extend his “stay” indefinitely; Shuxiu (Gong Liyo, who was also an editor on Wang Bing’s monumental Youth trilogy) is a Chinese bryologist (researcher of mosses) who teaches at a university and helps out with her aunt’s restaurant, with no mention of any plans to alter her life.

Life alterations (and lack thereof) form the central conundrums surrounding Here. Based on Richard McGuire’s 2014 graphic novel—a 304-page tome itself expanded from a 6-page comic story in 1989, if there weren’t enough versions of Here already in play—it aims for what scans as an immensely ambitious undertaking: to chronicle the events of a specific place from prehistoric times to the modern day in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Like its source(s), Here uses a fixed, slightly askew perspective—here somewhere on the wall between a house’s living room and dining room; the graphic novel is closer to the corner of the room and produces a more angular yet more “neutral” composition, while the comic story’s point of view only looks at a corner of the living room by the window—that, in the film’s most publicized gambit, restricts Zemeckis to a single camera set-up for the entirety of Here.

It should be said that, despite my great admiration for both films, Here is a definitely stronger, more cohesive, and ultimately more beautiful work than Here. The opening shots of each swiftly communicate both the intentions and the level of subtlety each is operating on: Here observes a construction site in the distance with trees largely covering it in the foreground, an elegant interplay in emphases between the human-constructed city and the nature that will assert itself in fits and starts within these confines before eventually fully taking over the narrative. It’s difficult to talk about what exactly constitutes a shot within Here, since it uses the source’s technique of placing frames within frames to capture a part of the spot of land at a different time from the primary tableaux surrounding it, but Here opens with a car driving in front of the house, different frames within frames capturing three different cars along the same trajectory, before a multitude of views of the home interior and/or undeveloped land at different times that eventually resolve into the first dialogue scene with Here‘s central couple, Richard (Tom Hanks) and Margaret (Robin Wright), as they enter what was the former’s home for more than half a century. Elegance is and isn’t the name of the game for Here which, for all its narratives—intersecting in space but not time—reveals itself to be the tale of the Young clan, from the time that Richard’s parents moved into the house after World War II to his moving out in the early 2000s. For many, that sixty-year timespan feels reminiscent of the last time Zemeckis, Hanks, Wright, and co-screenwriter last collaborated on a film, resulting in the vastly more popular Forrest Gump thirty years ago. While Here‘s hokeyness and eagerness to track the times that are a’changin’ do strike a chord of recognition, it’s a comparison that feels as limited as the film’s perspective.

Speaking of which: one of Here‘s most brilliant moments reveals the canniness of its aesthetic strategy: the first definable “incident” on this patch of land, both chronologically and in the unfolding of the film, shows the extinction of the dinosaurs, complete with copious amounts of lava and fleeing reptiles. Any conventional treatment of this event, a spectacular global disaster, would feature grand sweeping shots of the devastation that showed off the scale of the barren, fiery landscapes. Here, on the other hand, refuses such elaborations, and its restraint signals the divide between this patch of land and others; while much can be inferred about the (eventually literal) outside world and a great deal is brought into the house, spoken about, and shown on television, it is left to the imagination what might happen. Here is a film that revels in imagination, in the direct images of its characters’ experiences and the thrumming richness of the world that surrounds them. Though it takes place over five days and four nights, its sense of time feels considerably more porous than the ordinary cycle of light and dark. Part of that has to do with Stefan’s habitual insomnia, which stretches out nights to achieve not the sustained mood of Devos’s previous film, but instead a slippage between waking and dreamed life.

Both Stefan and Shuxiu experience this second state at one point: the latter’s represents her first entry into the film, describing in Mandarin Chinese voiceover a morning in bed where she briefly forgot the names of the things surrounding her, moving from panic to an acceptance of a oneness with the world that is broken up by the sound of an outside siren. The images that accompany this recounting, a series of shots in the woods of the mosses and trees, precede Shuxiu’s first on-screen appearance, and are echoed during a brief nap Stefan takes while paying a visit to the hospital his sister works at. It’s possible to see Here as a film simultaneously highlighting and dismissing the unity of world. Though the various occupants of the land fall into consciously rhyming cycles, sometimes in a manner that manages to be equally revelatory and short-sighted—an early airplane fanatic and patriarch dies from the Spanish flu, while the Latine housekeeper for a Black family (notably the only domestic worker in the whole film) is all-too-unsubtly shown developing COVID—the swath of experience inevitably calls attention to the disparities on display.

The Youngs live in a continual state of middle-class malaise, with Richard forced to give up on his painting aspirations by an unplanned pregnancy, becoming an insurance salesman while he and Margaret continue to live in the house with his parents and siblings; a 1940s couple eventually gets rich by inventing the La-Z-Boy chair and immediately departs for California; two other families live there for a seemingly brief period of time before a death drives them away. But through all the passings in their own family, the Youngs stay far longer than they should, as much at the mercy of capitalist striving as their own inertia. Here reflects this emotional turmoil with an eerie placidity, incorporating their sufferings with those of others—including a Lenni-Lenape couple whose own family formation coincides on-screen with Richard and Margaret’s, eventually concluding with the woman’s death from old age—into the inexorable passage of time. Though certain milestones are clearer than others (none moreso than a television showing the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show, a sign of Zemeckis returning to the roots of his debut I Wanna Hold Your Hand), the signposting that generally occurs is resolutely ordinary or undercut: New Year’s Eve 2003, the end of the Revolutionary War being met with a verbal shrug. The origins of the La-Z-Boy, as much amusing on-screen attention as it gets, seem to be forgotten by history, and the only thing that people point out is the beautiful historical building across the street, belonging to, of all people, Benjamin Franklin’s extra-marital son, who staunchly backed the British colonial forces. The famed inventor and Founding Father makes an appearance, but that grand house is literally backgrounded at almost all times, a footnote in history only notable because it happens to be the only colonial governor’s mansion still standing today. To be overshadowed by barely remembered history is something of a terrible state of existence.

Here has a few half-remembered invocations of history, both anthropocentric and natural: a friend of Stefan’s points out that the first trains to travel in mainland Europe arrived in Brussels, which he in turn mentions to Shuxiu a little while after she tells him that mosses were the first plants to grow on land. Where the great anguish and only half-convincing catharsis of Here lies in all the ways the modern world can make a person feel small, Here is largely content with that designation, even embracing it in many ways. It’s useful of course to see the mosses that become so crucial to the last third of Here as a synecdoche for the film’s aims: a thing that grows everywhere without people noticing it—Stefan even draws a comparison to himself—that is itself “a forest full of life.” But this move into nature only heightens the more (figuratively) subterranean beauty of the abutting city in night and day, and draws further attention to the ways in which Stefan was already interacting with nature: his preparations of soup to fully empty his fridge before his journeys, the various seeds that mysteriously appear in his pocket, his trip to a communal garden. Here is much more about finding the joy in the place where you live, but Here‘s slender narrative invokes this idea when it comes to Stefan’s situation: in an early scene in his apartment, he looks out his window at the city, before turning back and saying “this is my home” in Romanian, a phrase that, depending where you look, has a completely different meaning.

Here has garnered many divergent reactions and points of comparison—Michael Snow’s structuralist masterpiece Wavelength, the fixed proscenium staging of the Lumières, the grand-scale suburbia of The Tree of Life, the similar constraints of Steven Soderbergh’s Presence from this year—but it’s worth pointing out what, to me, strikes me as some key differences from the little I’ve glimpsed of the graphic novel (I’ve read and liked the comic story decently). Though the central narrative appears to be similar, there’s an abstract quality to much of Here, with its constant aim to find contextless juxtapositions between similar activities across time, that Here, for all its strengths, does not attempt to emulate: even as the constant shifting makes it purposefully difficult to get fully acclimated to the various storylines for the first twenty minutes or so, this does ultimately aim to tell a set of linear stories.

And yet, Here‘s adherence to traditional dramatics and relatively coherent screen elements produces its own daring innovations and reference points. The former is the removal of the year designation within each frame within the frame, automatically producing a destabilizing effect wholly removed from the greater use of such frames in the comics. While guesses can be made as to the origin of these individual shots, and the frames within frames are used more to transition between scenes rather than to constantly interrupt the proceedings, the effect is of a time period (minutes or decades apart) intruding upon one another, where the death march of the narrative becomes only crueler and more sobering when juxtaposed in the same frame with a celebration at another time. Méliès might be the better silent cinema pioneer to refer to, both in terms of cutting-edge technology—the extensive use of generative AI to de-age the actors during the take is never completely convincing but feels remarkably close, an uncanny valley Zemeckis has dwelled in for many years—and in a self-conscious theatricality. The living room runs deep into the background, though not quite as much as the graphic novel’s, but while Here varies its focal points’ distance from the camera well, many scenes are played rather close, with characters frequently looking disconcertingly off-screen past the camera, or beginning or ending a scene by walking towards or away from an unknown sector. Perhaps the film’s single most galvanizing moment expands the viewer’s sense—knowingly jarring them away from the perspective of the characters—of the space with a sublimely simple device.

The ending of Here is as ambiguous as the ending of Here is unambiguous, but both find a clear place of resolution that centers around a realization of all that remains forgotten and uncomprehended. Even though Here‘s title is used frequently, down to being the very last word spoken, the formal choice that accompanies it acts as a revelation for the audience that, once again, was apparent to the characters all along. Here contains a much more modest, yet no less impactful movement of its own, carrying within it an unmistakable sense of tenderness and curiosity that explores an interior rather than exterior space. Nick Newman (via Adam Nayman) has a much more cynical view of the final perspective of Here‘s, and it’s true that its neat narrative tidiness speaks just as much to all that has been lost and the even further diminished stature of this central couple, but the very last frames within the frame—returning to look once more at the little living room where centuries of personal history have taken place—feels remarkably in line with Here‘s mosses: a mini-forest of life, full of pleasure and pain.