Here (2024)

My favorite moment in any film is when Emma and Mr. Knightley put their hands together in 2020’s Emma. It’s a silly scene, all stodgy costumes and ornate dancing; I’m not even sure I could call it well-acted. But when the two lock arms and orbit one another, the electricity of their touch renders me breathless. It’s as though I’ve been waiting all my life for that moment rather than an hour looking at Anya Taylor-Joy on the screen.

When that electricity strikes, when the coming together of two fictional hands overwhelms me, I know that a film is working. For all its historical adornment, Emma works; I buy into Emma’s journey and yearn for her, rather than those around her, to find happiness. But what I’m feeling, the invisible hand pulsing giddy emotion through my cynical veins, is tension. I can feel the possibility that Emma might not end up with Knightley—Austen makes compelling cases that she should not, ratcheting up the suspense as the delicate proto-romcom baubles toward its quietly triumphant pairing.

Here, the 2024 Belgian film directed by Baz Devos, would seem an odd companion for Emma, let alone all this talk about electricity. Set in Brussels during a rainy season, the film follows construction worker Stefan (Stefan Gota) as he leaves his high-rise work site for an extended holiday trip to his home in Romania. In the film's first half, we see nothing but Stefan preparing for his journey. He makes soup to empty his fridge and delivers it to family and friends.

I’ve never been to Brussels, but Devos introduces a lumbering giant with a soft side. As Stefan walks between destinations, we enter quiet communal gardens and dim cafes, places suggesting solitude despite their potential as hubs. Although Stefan cuts through lush locations on the outskirts, suggesting a peaceful coexistence, his profession looms; his work engineers an encroachment on the tranquil places across the road and behind the chain link fences. Still, Here resists recriminating these commercial spaces, lighting them with just enough gentle light for their intimacy to breathe. When he crashes on the table while his sister looks on near the film’s midpoint, Stefan bothers no one and finds no disturbance. “I have to go,” she says. But yet she waited while he dozed.

Meanwhile, ShuXiu (Liyo Gong) stares through a microscope at a sample. A bryologist, ShuXiu splits her workdays between a solitary desk and a dark lecture hall where she teaches botany. Like Stefan, her emotions are restrained and subdued, but her investment in this minute work goes unquestioned. Just as all takers toast the soup he made, proving his skill and compassion, so too do we watch ShuXiu pause on the sidewalk to collect a square of moss. The building it grows beneath towers over her; she notices nothing. It’s the unseen infinitesimal forest that inspires awe.

Although I knew this film’s trajectory—Here made Tim Grierson’s personal Top Ten list—I’d bet you understand my invocation of Emma now. When Stefan and ShuXiu meet in the unfussy noodle shop of her aunt, there is instant, unspoken chemistry. Beset by persistent rain behind the window Stefan foregrounds, their polite interactions across the restaurant offer gentle sunlight. There’s no hint of flirtation unless you listen to Stefan’s slightly-more-eager chiming or squint at the corners of ShuXiu’s smile. The world goes on around them, something they thoughtfully commiserate over when a delivery man exits into the downpour, but you know what this is. We know. It wouldn’t be a spoiler to say these two will meet again.

Unlike Emma, a film that clamors toward the inevitable conclusion near-every romantic comedy since has taught us to anticipate, Here breathes. Deeply. When the two find one another again, by pure happenstance, Devos turns off all clocks and unspools time for our characters. Meandering through the forest, running fingers across microbial forests while the city they inhabit quietly looms just beyond earshot, these two engage with nature more than one another. Rarely, if ever, do we get a shot of these two together. The lanky Stefan loses his upper body to the 4:3 aspect ratio; the inquisitive ShuXiu strolls so far ahead that she momentarily loses her fortuitous walking partner. Do they spend two hours together? Do they pass two eternities out in the woods? No matter—their rendezvous with the natural world is timeless because so is this tether between them. When the moment arrives where they finally face one another, their expressive faces escaping the frame does nothing to tame the cosmic forces that have united

Nothing happens. Devos shows us nothing, that is. Not unlike Emma’s and Knightley’s hands, this acknowledgment of what we in the audience have been waiting for is ephemeral. It’s just a moment. These two might well be cellular organisms in a moss forest of merely another scale. It isn’t heartbreaking any more than the divergent forces postponing Emma’s ultimate romantic collision with Knightley because we know—we know—what we’ve witnessed, but it is disorienting. The film watches cellular slides and fluttering leaves longer than it gives us Stefan and ShuXiu.

We bring so much of ourselves into viewing a film. I toted that magical minute of Emma, for instance, but I also brought more harrowing questions. Stefan’s journey betrays signals of finality; the beet broth in his delicious soup puts ominous thoughts in my head. Is ShuXiu happy with her work? Her pleasant encouragement with students comes naturally, but her polite smile there pales in comparison to her rosy cheeks while chit-chatting with Stefan. The film has one blinking moment of magic realism—what does it mean? My brain isn’t wired for the gentle breeze that is Here. I spent many a languorous shot searching behind the frame for mysteries.

If I understand the science outlined in Devos’s screenplay, moss is little more than a cluster of tiny trees ShuXiu calls a forest. When I think of forests, I picture the massive sequoias in San Francisco or the sky-kissing oak that once graced my parents’ backyard. Those trees have massive roots, roots so large they can destroy a foundation or Challenge young climbers by themselves. Moss, therefore, must consist of tiny roots; that’s why our protagonists have no trouble extricating squares from their environment. There’s so much moss on every log, every stump, every boulder—the scale of these ecological marvels deceives us into missing the life sheltered within and waiting to spread its spores across the earth. Like those miniature plants, Stefan carries seeds in his pocket. He seeks somewhere to plant them but resists the generous plots others offer.

 

Pause Here before its final scene. I guarantee you’ll know when you’ve reached it. Give yourself a moment to think about what should come next. Think about everything you’ve seen, and maybe think about what I’ve written. If you’re like me, you’ll find yourself listening for something. If you’re like me, you’ll be surprised by what Here delivers in its place and when it cuts to darkness.

If you’re like me, you’ll also find yourself with gentle tears of joy the film shouldn’t have earned but did.

In multitudes.