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| TRAILER |
In I Live Here Now, the feature debut of writer-director Julie Pacino, the first question arrives early and lingers like smoke from the wildfires that encroach upon its heroine’s flight: “Why do you make everything so weird?” It is asked of Rose, a struggling actress played with tremulous restraint by Lucy Fry, by her dim, cosseted boyfriend Travis (Matt Rife). But it might just as easily be directed at Pacino herself, whose debut is a fever dream of saturated color, recursive trauma, and gothic interiors that seem to breathe alongside their inhabitants.
That weirdness is both the film’s calling card and its stumbling block. Born from Pacino’s NFT photography series of the same name, I Live Here Now announces itself as a work of image-making first and narrative construction second. It is a puzzle box less concerned with the elegance of its solution than with the baroque flourish of its compartments. Yet within its lacquered surfaces lies a thorny, sometimes piercing meditation on bodily autonomy, inherited shame, and the monstrous expectations placed upon women’s bodies.
The premise is deceptively simple. Rose, on the brink of what might be her last chance at professional redemption, receives a callback from a formidable casting agent, Cindy (Cara Seymour). The stipulations are punishingly familiar: lose three pounds in two days; submit a self-tape; become smaller, more pliant, more bookable. Then comes the rupture. A positive pregnancy test—impossible, she thought, after years of believing herself sterile—threatens to derail the fragile architecture of her ambition.
Telling Travis goes badly. Telling his mother, Marge (a glacial, blade-sharp Sheryl Lee), is worse. Marge, swathed in crimson and contempt, is less interested in Rose than in the fetus she considers family property. Faced with this encroaching matriarchal tyranny, Rose flees. Wildfires blaze across California. She checks into a remote motel in Idyllwild called the Crown Inn. Or perhaps the Crown Inn checks into her.
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The hotel’s denizens are less characters than embodiments. Ada (Lara Clear), the perpetually inebriated proprietor, exudes a dissipated sensuality. Sid (Sarah Rich), the cherubic receptionist, radiates infantilized cheer. And then there is Lillian, played by Madeline Brewer with predatory relish—a knowing, sadistic presence who seems to intuit Rose’s secrets before Rose herself can articulate them. Together, they form a triptych of possible futures and fractured selves, facets of womanhood warped by compliance, repression, and survival.
Pacino’s visual language is unapologetically referential. The saturated reds and blues nod toward Dario Argento’s giallo extravagance; the dream logic and doubling evoke David Lynch. At moments, one might detect the humid menace of Lynch’s Twin Peaks or the operatic dread of Suspiria. Yet Pacino’s sensibility is less derivative than devotional. She is not merely quoting her influences but situating herself within a lineage of filmmakers who treat space as psyche and décor as destiny.
Cinematographer Aron Meinhardt leans into this ethos, bathing corridors in hot pinks and jaundiced yellows, desaturating the “real world” so that the motel’s interiors throb with hallucinatory life. The production design by Hannah Rawson and Lucie Brooks Butler is a triumph of curated excess: womb-like chambers, mirrored hallways, brocades that seem to pulse. Editor Matyas Fekete, whose collaborations with Peter Strickland have honed a taste for sensory immersion, stitches together past and present with disorienting fluidity. Scenes do not so much cut as bleed into one another.
Sound, too, becomes an instrument of unease. The score by Jackson Greenberg and Pam Autuori (recording as TOMI) pulses with percussive anxiety and breathy, almost panting vocals. It underscores the film’s central conceit: that Rose’s crisis is both psychological and corporeal. Her body is a contested site—by her agent, by her boyfriend, by his mother, by the spectral memory of a childhood trauma hinted to be gynecological and unspeakable.
It is here that I Live Here Now locates its most compelling terrain. The horror is not primarily in jump scares or gore—though Pacino deploys a few jolts with bracing effectiveness—but in the slow realization that Rose has internalized the very forces that seek to diminish her. “You’re nobody’s prisoner but your own,” one character intones, a line that might feel trite were it not embedded within such an oppressive mise-en-scène.
And yet, for all its aesthetic assurance, the film sometimes withholds too much of the mundane world it seeks to destabilize. Because Pacino plunges us so swiftly into nightmare, we are given scant foothold in normality. Rose begins the film already unmoored; her baseline is abstraction. As a result, her descent—or ascent—lacks some of the emotional velocity it might otherwise carry. The stakes are clear in theory: autonomy versus erasure, individuation versus inheritance. But in practice, the narrative scaffolding can feel thin beneath the ornamental weight.
Fry’s performance is crucial in counterbalancing this tendency. Where others pitch toward operatic intensity—Lee’s Marge a study in icy hauteur, Brewer’s Lillian a feline embodiment of cruelty—Fry remains grounded, almost stubbornly so. Her Rose is not hysterical but hollowed out, moving through the motel’s rococo chambers with the wary stillness of prey. It is a canny choice. By refusing to match the film’s baroque temperature, she becomes its emotional anchor.
There are flashes of mordant humor. The suite named “The Lovin’ Oven” contains a crib. Wi-Fi is available only in the restaurant, though smoking is permitted everywhere. Pacino delights in these absurdities, and the film’s chaptered structure—announced like sections in a novel—further underscores its literary aspirations. At times, however, these gestures risk tipping into self-consciousness. One senses the director straining toward significance, eager to vault into the canon of feminist psychological horror.
Still, ambition is not a sin. If anything, it is the animating force of I Live Here Now. In an era when so many genre films arrive pre-packaged and algorithmically sanded, Pacino’s debut feels defiantly personal. Its preoccupations—with trauma, with reproductive choice, with the performance of femininity—are not merely topical but intimate. The film does not always cohere; its pacing can sag, its symbolism clatter. But it is alive with intention.
In the end, Rose’s confrontation is not with a single villain but with a lineage of silences. The Crown Inn becomes a crucible in which past and present combust, where maternal figures loom as both jailers and warnings. Outside, the wildfires threaten annihilation. Inside, another conflagration burns: the possibility of self-definition.
“I live here now,” the title insists—a declaration that is at once resignation and reclamation. For Rose, to live “here” may mean inhabiting her body without apology, claiming authorship over her own narrative. For Pacino, it signals an arrival. Imperfect, overwrought, but undeniably striking, I Live Here Now marks the emergence of a filmmaker willing to risk excess in pursuit of something visceral and true. In a cinematic landscape often allergic to sincerity, that risk alone feels worth taking.
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