

Featured Review
Here ★★★★★
Released: 17th January 2025
Director: Robert Zemeckis
Starring: Robin Wright, Tom Hanks, Paul Bettany, Kelly Reilly & Michelle Dockery
Robert Zemeckis’s Here is somewhat of a miracle. Treading the lines between life and death, pain and joy, of memories and moments, radiating with such burning a sentience and vulnerability that serves as a gentle reminder to the living to remind us of what has come before. Adapted from a novel of the same name, Robert Zemeckis and Eric Roth bring such honest and emotional illumination to Richard McGuire’s words. Utilising the same visual conceit as in the graphic novel, throughout the narrative, opens the door to magical, symbiotic relationships between past and present. The conceit being a singular, unbroken, static shot that sits in the left-hand corner of the frame, as Zemeckis and editor Jesse Goldsmith navigate the spectator through space and time through individual, differing sized singular frames. Frames within frames, present life coexisting with the past, shared experiences and traumas all harboured in the same liminal space. Frankly the result is entirely hypnotic and wholly spectacular.
Beginning with the Mesozoic Era, of dinosaurs and meteorites, Zemeckis traverses space and time and through the ages through to the present. The spectator witnesses many faces, and beings, both animal and human who all exist in this singular space. From First Nation settlers, Benjamin Franklin’s endeavours, through to the War of Independence, the American Civil War, industrialisation and the wars of the 20th Century and ending with post-COVID, the inhabitants all share one thing in common, love and kinship. Through the trials and tribulations of life, to the beauty and love of connection, it is most notable that Zemeckis is a master navigator in walking the line of both throughout the film’s 105 minute runtime.
With a mostly stern and loathsome disapproval for the use of ‘AI’ in any form of creative practice, it is to my amazement that Metaphysic Live’s real-time generative AI face transformation technique works to surprisingly good effect. What this inevitably allows for, is unbelievably poignant and careful performances from Here’s ensemble. This is not to state that the use of ‘AI’ is redeemable or forgivable in my eyes, but that it in fact works in Here, so much so that for most of its runtime it doesn’t even come to mind.

At the film’s core are the generational hand-me-downs of life’s unexpected traumas, with the ensemble cast feeding and holding space in these frames, or doors through time, so to speak. Robin Wright, plays Margaret Young, with scintillating honesty, Tom Hanks, Richard Young, whose mother and father are performed tremendously by Kelly Reilly and Paul Bettany. Navigating through life’s joys and difficulties, generating identity, adopting creative endeavours and occupying space by feeling and existing in moments is what makes Here such a remarkable audiovisual expression. Memories fragmenting and existing through time as doorways into the past, Here is an absolute masterwork of the highest emotional quality. It must be acknowledged that under the directorial sensibilities of very few filmmakers would a work like Here function so magnificently, and it is without question that Robert Zemeckis is one of those few.
To echo the film’s sentiments, the past serves as a reminder of what has brought us to the present, to where we are in space and time. Zemeckis’s entire oeuvre navigates this spectrum of life and death, of past and present, from Contact and Allied, all the way through to his experimental and wildly feverish animated work with Beowulf and A Christmas Carol. It is without question that, personally, Here will quite easily go down as one of the most emotionally attune, vulnerable and brilliantly realised filmic works of 2025.
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