Two of the best movies currently playing in theaters, the RaMell Ross-directed Oscar nominee Nickel Boys and Steven Soderbergh’s Presence, perform extended experiments with a movie camera’s point of view. In Nickel Boys, Ross uses mostly POV shots in an attempt to closely and impressionistically convey the experience of the protagonists, two young Black men sent to a prison disguised as a reform school in the 1960s. In Presence, Soderbergh uses POV to depict the unseen ghostly force that’s haunting a family’s new home; every shot is from the ghost’s point of view. But there’s a third and most-maligned entry in this unofficial camera-gimmick trilogy, one that’s now available, appropriately enough, in the living room of Netflix subscribers: Here, by Robert Zemeckis, one of the best and least-acclaimed films of 2024.
While Ross and Soderbergh attach their points of view to specific characters (even if one doesn’t have corporeal form), Zemeckis plays with the concept of the camera’s omniscience and objectivity. Taking its central technical conceit from its graphic novel source material, the movie places a camera in a fixed spot, and – with one exception that essentially proves the rule – it does not move for the entire 100 minutes or so.
The majority of this time is spent observing a family, as Richard (Tom Hanks) and Margaret (Robin Wright) get married and have kids early, live with Richard’s parents until they inherit the place and make it their own, somewhat against Margaret’s wishes. That section of the movie spans from Richard’s father returning home just after World War II in the mid-40s to the family leaving the house sometime around the turn of the 21st century. But the movie expands beyond them in both directions; we see the family that inhabits the house after them, and some of the residents of the house (and, before the house, the plot of land) in the decades, centuries, and even millennia before our de facto main characters arrive.
Zemeckis employs another trick to move between time periods, also adapted from the graphic novel: Transitions between scenes often come via a “panel” that emerges on screen, acting as sort of a time-traveling x-ray, showing a bit of the frame at another time period, while eventually the rest of the frame catches up to that period. Alternately, sometimes that panel will linger in the same time period, while the rest of the frame dissolves into the future or past. (One of the most memorable uses of this device starts on a scene of the family watching the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, with the band lingering on the TV, and the soundtrack, as the rest of the scene fades into a wedding a few years later.) As such, the story of Richard and Margaret is mostly linear, aided by digital de-aging and then digital aging of Hanks and Wright’s middle-aged faces, while the glimpses of other inhabitants (including a happy-go-lucky couple, Benjamin Franklin, a group of natives, and, briefly, a dinosaur) skip around in time (though they do primarily move forward within their own respective timelines).
There’s more than a hint of virtual reality in this tech-heavy set-up. The fixed interior frame, with anything resembling nature clearly created on a computer, feels like a mix of black-box theater and the Volume, the digital studio tech used on a bunch of Disney+ fantasies. This makes for a stark contrast with the immediacy of Nickel Boys and Presence, both of which use their cameras as the otherworldly elements, floating around or focusing in on certain elements of what look very much like genuine, tactile reality. The vantage of Here is more “real” – it looks more like what would be realistically visible if “we” were sitting in a corner of this living room – while also looking more like expensive fakery, from the digital aging to the stagy dialogue to those panels that look like portals to another world. This, I think, is probably why a lot of critics dismissed it during its ultra-brief theatrical run last fall; it resembles one of Zemeckis’s weird motion-capture experiences, even though it’s not technically a work of animation.
Yet Zemeckis’s experimenting in Here is bolder than ever, both in form and in content. The man long identified as a prototypical Boomer nostalgist – understandably so, as the guy who made the initially cockeyed but ultimately sentimental Forrest Gump , with the same stars and screenwriters as this movie – has now constructed something sadder and more reflective, a movie that nods to the Boomer stereotype of considering themselves the center of the universe (the dinosaurs, the erased native tribes, the fullness of American history, a world war, all leading up to… people who watched the Beatles on Ed Sullivan!) while also failing to highlight any kind of perceived Boomer exceptionalism. Richard and Margaret scarcely move out of the house they inherit, at least not until much later in lives that are, by most standards, fairly unremarkable, as full of self-sabotage, bad circumstances, and thwarted dreams as any other. It’s more engineered than Richard Linklater’s remarkable (and effects-light) Boyhood, but thematically, they’re not far apart.
“No longer chasing various tech demos across Hollywood, Zemeckis instead waits in a single spot, understanding that like it or not, the world will get busy passing him by.”
If Baby Boomers reckoning with their small triumphs and quotidian failures doesn’t sound like much fun, well, fair enough. But Here’s formal experimentation, its rejection of the go-anywhere virtual camera of earlier 21st-century Zemeckis movies, leavens the sadness as its core in a way that neither Nickel Boys nor Presence are ultimately designed to do. Zemeckis hasn’t entirely lost the playful wit of his earlier movies so much as he applies it in weirder and more sparing ways. Strangely, it’s now adult dramas like this and Allied that represent his best work; the youthful vigor of Back to the Future or Who Framed Roger Rabbit doesn’t translate into his more recent family-friendly movies like that ghastly Pinocchio remake – which is another way of saying Here’s sometime corniness is more feature than bug. The simulated passivity, all this technical bravado put into keeping the camera in place, brings the movie a sense of bizarre but spellbinding convergence, with comedy, drama, history, and the occasional visual-effects flourish criss-crossing across that same unmoving field of vision. No longer chasing various tech demos across Hollywood, Zemeckis instead waits in a single spot, understanding that like it or not, the world will get busy passing him by.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
