I Live Here Now

A young woman with an important life decision, an actor trying to win a part, each at once trying to conform to sets of expectations for a role. One made complicated by simultaneity, by the blurring of boundaries between various states. Reality, maternity, California.

Rose (Lucy Fry) has important news for Travis (Matt Rife). It's a situation he's not prepared for, despite a prelude that establishes he's got a thing for acceptably older women and can identify a bit of bondage equipment. Though smartphones appear frequently, with or without lentil soup or other bodily fluids, that instrument of pleasure appears as a cutout in a notebook. One that is also decorated with crowns, establishing quickly three recurrent elements. There are shades of giallo, of fairytale, of Lynch whose Los Angeles was so often a synthesis of those. Those are heavy references too, and while the film's ambition should be saluted it falls short in ways that frustrate.

The part Rose is reading for contains an important and repeated monologue, one that will form the basis of a 'tape' whose completion is one of the many thorny quests our heroine must navigate. The setting of "interior, cockpit, outer space" is no guarantee of quality but the page's use as a means of transition is an indicator of it. It's one of several places where among a litany of liftings and a hodge-podge of homage something shines.

Across that opening, five chapters, we will explore a liminal psychogeography. A love hotel without an exterior and whose internal geometries are as labyrinthine as any of the body's canals. Its wholly female staff and its sole other occupant wrapped up in the yellow wallpaper and other brocades of societal expectation. There's only wifi in the restaurant but smoking throughout. A potential starlet in this kind of trouble would stretch the Hays code but with minimal modification this could be from a golden age. With when and where as flexible the questions that matter are who and why. One of those is easier to answer than the others.

Sheryl Lee is Travis' mother, her recurrent red dress as obvious as blue velvet later grasped in a psychokinetic showdown. Or what might not be one, as doublings abound. In and among the indeterminate inn are corridors rich with reflective hangings that aren't quite halls of mirrors, echoes in the dark glass of sinister saunas. With Fry in these randomly romantic rooms are the youthful Sid (Sarah Rich) and the ruthless Lillian (Madeline Brewer). As Rose's stay extends her flattened affect is a continous contrast to theirs. It's not that scenery is literally chewed, but that Fry seems to be inheritor to the traditions of Sandy and Jeffrey, including a mysterious and foundational trauma.

A debut feature for writer/director Julie Pacino, her previous shorts have navigated similar territory. This film is a development from a previous photographic project, as she discussed in our interview. The music by Pam Autuori (sometimes credited as TOMI) and Jackson Greenberg has notes of Angelo Badalamenti's scoring for Twin Peaks, specifically the low and sustained ones as tonal indicators. Among other eponymous film-making styles that could perhaps also cover Cronenberg, and the infrequent flashes to jump and scare are perhaps closer to other horror hotels than more magically realist motels.

"You're nobody's prisoner but your own" would be a cryptic clue to unlock another film. Instead there's variously a key that hangs as heavy as a noose round another's neck and lampshades that aren't so much nodded to as pointed out. If it seems like these are cross words they're born of a sense that I Live Here Now could have had its cake and eaten it given a bit more time in the oven, lovin' or otherwise. Though a bit over an hour and a half its pacing means it feels longer, at times the balance between anticipation and ennui leaves it out of step.

As a first feature it's got enough moments to commend it, but not enough to recommend it. It's perhaps not that anything here is bad, but that it's so clearly trying to be better. In gymnastics scoring is based on the difficulty and its execution. The perfect pedestrian will pass, but that's not where glory lies. While I Live Here Now frequently falls short that's from a place of vaulting ambition.

Reviewed on: 18 Aug 2025