I LIVE HERE NOW (Fantastic Fest 2025) – Review by Nadine Whitney
Julie Pacino’s debut feature I Live Here Now is a strange and beguiling psychological and visual Fata Morgana. A lost woman, Rose (Lucy Fry), finds herself during a moment of intense personal disruption in an impossible hotel, the Crown Inn in a town called Idlewild. As Rose’s past, present, and future whirl around her the hotel takes hold of her trapping her into confrontations with darkness both inside and out.
Something happened to Rose as a child. Something unspeakable, gynaecological, and agreed upon by her mother. Rose as an adult is a struggling actor in a semi-relationship with Travis (Matt Ride) who is handsome, rich, and dull-witted. Rose gets her first important casting meeting for a couple of years with powerhouse agent Cindy (Cara Seymour). Cindy is interested in putting Rose forward for the role she simply requires a few things. The loss of three pounds in two days and a self-tape so she can send it to the production people. Cindy says Rose has to comply to break her “unbookable” streak.
Complying with that request is precisely what Rose planned to do until something she though impossible happens. She tests positive on a pregnancy test. For years she thought herself sterile, and now on the eve of her last chance break she’s facing a decision she never thought she’d have to make.
Telling Travis goes particularly badly not only for his slack-jawed reaction but because it also invokes the presence and opinions of his overbearing and ice-queen mother, Marge (a fantastic Sheryl Lee). There’s no way that Marge will allow “trash” like Rose to become part of her family, but the foetus inside Rose? That’s family business and she will ensure she has control over that. Rose packs up and runs out of town and finds a clinic where she gets a termination pill. She also finds the Crown Inn, or it finds her. Once there, her world becomes a florid and gothic nightmare with three other women (one a guest, one an employee, and one the owner) each who seem familiar to Rose and who each hold secrets that can unlock Rose’s past.
The perpetually drunk owner, Ada (Lara Clear) insists that the bright and child-like bell-hop Sid (Sarah Rich) place Rose in a suite; The Lovin’ Oven (with a crib inside). There is another guest staying, the dark, knowing, and cruel Lillian (Madeline Brewer) who delights in sadistic mind games. Outside the hotel bushfires rage threatening to turn and destroy the hotel itself. Inside, the hotel (incredibly decorated and designed by Lucie Brooks Butler and Hannah Lawson) a different kind of conflagration is occurring, the burning of Rose’s fragile ego as she fights to overcome not only the recent shocks but also face the monstrous and controlling “mothers” who have placed their pain and fear directly upon her self-scarred body and trauma scarred mind.
Uncanny dwellings and spaces that substitute for a protagonist’s sense of self aren’t unusual in film, literature, and visual art. However, Julie Pacino’s film has something specific in it that keeps it from brushing too close to cliché. The hotel itself is gaudily, dangerously, and intoxicatingly feminine. It also holds secrets and scars that want to keep Rose from becoming individuated from a place where pain seeps through the walls and destinies appear already writ. Cinematographer Aron Meinhardt captures the Alice in Wonderland absurdity of the place and Lucy Fry commits to her performance as a young woman pushed down the hole into an upside-down but recognisable space that has destroyed others before her (Ada is an example of that, as too Lillian). The heritage of women’s pain and madness redolent of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper fills the frame. It is up to Rose to finally face what has kept her in thrall to self-harm and depression and find a way to emerge as a whole self which means acknowledging the unspeakable and bringing forth her own rebirth.
I Live Here Now is an incredibly assured debut by Julie Pacino that disturbs and intrigues. It is a dark and majestic work of psychological and body horror that refuses to hold back on harm done. A twisted fairytale of courage and claimed selfhood.
