Life isn’t too short – it is longwhile Robert Zemeckis’ lively, imaginative and serious latest experiment, “Here,” ponders, in one hour and 40 minutes, several centuries and lifetimes unfolding in the same place on Earth. The Oscar-winning, on-again, off-again filmmaker delves into prehistoric times when dinosaurs roamed the earth, chronicles the arrival of indigenous peoples in this very place, gives us the birth of Benjamin Franklin, his child and his child’s child, and then takes us through takes us through the life and times of a mid-century American family led by the elderly Tom Hanks and Robin Wright. For Zemeckis, it’s a “Forrest Gump” reunion in more ways than one, because alongside Forrest and Jenny, here Richard and Margaret Young, Eric Roth, the film’s Oscar-winning writer, is working on the adaptation of Richard McGuire’s acclaimed graphic novel .

For all the good and bad of what I’m about to say, call this Zemeckis “Tree of Life” – and often with the same syrupy sap – or even his “Amour” – albeit with a more half-full version of Death and Regret – in the x-ray of a couple across decades and against the backdrop of the eruption of history and the destruction and restoration of the earth from the Ice Age to Black Lives Matter. That Zemeckis and cinematographer Don Burgess manage to pack multiple life experiences into a single space, with a fixed camera on top and most importantly take it off is quite a feat for a director who many fans dropped out of school for after The Polar Express ushered in his 21st-century era of dwelling in the uncanny motion-capture valley of facelifted digital technology.

In “Here,” we meet Richard (Hanks) and Margaret (Wright) as horny American teenagers, an approximation of the actors’ youth restored through metaphysical technology. The Hollywood AI company feeds thousands of archival images of actors’ faces into an engine to create a kind of “digital makeup” that is then superimposed on them not only in post, but also during the actual filming (see this more later). “Here” occasionally runs into the same problems as Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman” in the technical flaws of aging: The 68-year-old Hanks’ physique and posture often don’t match the vibrant young face of the “Big” era plastered on him. Through no fault of his own, the actor is less supple than the teenager he plays. With an angelic digital airbrushing, Wright fares better, although we’re never aware that these are actors three times the age of the characters they’re playing. They haven’t yet managed to de-age these familiar voices.

The feeling continues until the film’s wistful coda takes us to a near-post-COVID future, with the actors playing older than they are now and with minimal changes. Zemeckis’ use of this groundbreaking technology – a general departure that is still controversial among actors – allows for more movement and emotion than prosthetics could. A little face powder and Vaseline on the lens isn’t it, and “Here,” which works with a complex network of AI and visual effects supervisors, is ethically watertight in that it’s the actual actors and not likenesses or scanned versions of themselves on screen. (She starred in an earlier and now shockingly prescient Robin Wright film, Ari Folman’s 2014 The Congress named Robin Wright who undergoes such a scanning process and subsequently finds that her entire being has been erased.)

For a film that takes place almost entirely in a living room and shows us all the people who have lived and passed through the four walls of a colonial-era home for many, many years, “Here” gives the film a new and perhaps literal meaning the concept of “moving image”. Everything in “Here” takes place within a single, limited framework that mimics the graphic novel’s source material – trying to put it into words ruins the whole thing, but on screen it appears picture-in-picture-like Format (like when you’re watching one sports game in one corner of your TV while the other is playing out larger behind it. Please excuse the basic analogy.) these are panels that overlap different stories at different times but in the same space capture.

On a white-bordered panel we could see the rather playful Prohibition-era couple who bought the house in the 1920s, the Beekmans – the husband, played by David Fynn, appears to be the inventor of the La-Z-Boy recliner Woman is a whirling free spirit, played by Ophelia Lovibond and seemingly born on the wrong acre! Elsewhere on the screen, you can focus your gaze on another image featuring Richard and Margaret, or Richard’s parents (played by Paul Bettany and Kelly Reilly) in a moment of ecstasy or, more likely, one of their arguments. Meanwhile, an indigenous couple (Joel Oulette and Dannie McCallum) build their own lives in the same place centuries earlier. Or there’s a scowling Michelle Dockery in the 1910s, begging her amateur pilot husband not to fall into the airplane death trap again. Everything unfolds in the same space – Zemeck is a great conductor of everything, moving the pieces into place like a collage or a puzzle – resulting in a controlled but never relaxed perspective.

What “Here” evokes most effectively is either life’s cruelest disappointments or its languid cutscenes. The idea that we all become our parents who became theirs before us, and so the exodus swirls, becomes literal when Richard, a wannabe artist, hangs up his palette and paint to become an insurance salesman. A man in a suit and tie, just like his father Al (Paul Bettany), whose hopeless dreams were transformed him into a suit-wearing vacuum salesman and alcoholic and into the type of man who, with a cigarette in his mouth and a sparkling drink in his hand, asks, “What’s wrong with being a wife?” As Margaret, now forced after her pregnancy living with her in-laws, longing to be more than just a housewife. In another scene, I’ve never seen a film that captures so strongly the holiday feeling of being trapped in a carpeted room reeking of smoke and alcohol on a midday, with family members you can’t stand . Until one of them croaks and the film jumps back in time again. “Here” never stops moving, even if it stays in one place.

Where “Here” stumbles is in the Kodak moments that don’t translate well to cinema, the effervescent seriousness that Zemeckis regular Alan Silvestri underlines in his saccharine, overblown score. But Zemeckis is an astute technician of style, as a leak in the living room roof in one timeline coincides with the rupture of a heavily pregnant Margaret’s water in another, with the birth of her daughter Vanessa (played in the ’80s by the filmmaker’s daughter, Zsa) . Zsa Zemeckis) had to happen right in this living room. Meanwhile, Wright is poignant in moments that reveal Margaret’s genuine, crushing frustration at having to share a roof with her in-laws – especially because Richard fears a change that would drive her from his family home. It’s a frustrating contrivance to keep these people trapped (and, in a sense, left to rot) in the same room, but Roth and Zemeckis make it ring entirely true given the couple’s economic situation. Even though sometimes you wish they would just leave and take us with them.

As for the film’s sketchy political musings, some storylines aren’t as deep as the Youngs’, including the wonderful Nikki Amuka-Bird and Nicholas Pinnock as a black couple who buy the Youngs’ house after Richard and Margaret drive themselves crazy and out. In one scene, Devon (Pinnock) instructs his son (Cache Vanderpuye) on how to behave toward a police officer if he’s pulled over – to avoid arrest or worse. This zeitgeisty flourish is nothing more than an ingenuity. The way Zemeckis and Roth also incorporate this indigenous history into flashback briefly transforms “Here” into a kind of cinematic land acknowledgment, taken literally when a group of archaeological scientists show up at the Youngs’ house to dig up bones in their backyard . So turn the wheels of time and the sensibilities of filmmakers who must adapt to them, otherwise they will be accused of being out of touch.

Zemeckis attempts to summarize the entirety of the centuries in a single image and a short running time (at least by today’s standards), so not all of the detours hit the mark. If God exists, and if that God has a closed camera system, “Here” could be one of the channels such a God stumbles upon, millions of years of footage recorded on a property. The director of Death Becomes Her and Who Framed Roger Rabbit has always been on the horizon of film technology, and here he uses AI in a way that doesn’t feel entirely existentially threatening to his actors. (There were two monitors on set, one showing the raw footage in its original state and the other showing the actors with their digital makeup, a kind of enchanted video village of past and present.)

If you’ve ever walked through a house or lived in a house and wondered who was there before you – whether Paul Bettany as a moody drunk, Kelly Reilly as a stroke victim in a wheelchair, or Tom Hanks and Robin Wright as lovers who don’t can Seems to work, but I’ve definitely tried it – “Here” will resonate. But if you don’t have curiosity, then ultimately nothing, nothing is there for you.

Grade: B

“Here” premiered at AFI Fest 2024. Sony Pictures Releasing releases the film on November 1st.

Want to keep up with the film from IndieWire? Reviews and critical thoughts? Subscribe here to our newly launched In Review newsletter from David Ehrlich, where our chief film critic and reviews editor rounds up the best reviews and streaming picks and offers some new musings, all available only to subscribers.