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.

Nightbitch (2024)

As much as any movie I can remember, Nightbitch wanted to rip my throat out.

Maybe that’s appropriate.

That Amy Adams’ character has no name beyond “Mother” telegraphs Nightbitch’s bent. Adams plays the exhausted mom at the film’s center. The former high-brow artist totes her toddler son to storytime and keeps him from electrocuting himself with a fork. She’s frazzled, she’s harried, and she’s pissed. Her working husband’s job necessitates travel, and he’s useless in parent mode.

And she tells us as much. Over and over, Adams reads dialogue or plays out fantasies of spewing philosophic all over those who cross her. If you told me Nightbitch was adapted from a blog or first-person novel, I’d nod and go, “Yep”. Every time Adams talks, the film becomes a blunt instrument of righteous fury. Nightbitch froths at the mouth, daring you to criticize its overclocked protagonist.

 

 

Who also turns into a dog. Maybe. You see, Nightbitch is high-concept that takes its high on the side. Trying to stake some claims about the animalism of motherhood and its violent suppression of humanity, sometimes the film goes body horror, with Adams unfurling a stringy tail from a puss-filled lump above her butt. Another time, she viciously maims the family pet…probably?

For a script that believes its audience incapable of detecting subtly and a Scoot McNairy performance that puts its hand so forcefully on the scale the thing explodes, Nightbitch withholds a lot of answers. Whether the writer/director believes that lends it a hazy surrealism evocative of late-night feedings or because she’s struggling to unite such a diverse and unruly pack of conceits, I’m not sure, but the result is a clunky, jarring, pseudo-magic realist lecture about parental sacrifice.

Contractual obligations dictate that I now acknowledge that I am not a parent and, thus, incapable of comprehending the metamorphosis wrought on the DNA of a woman when she becomes a mom. I watch many movies whose wavelengths I never find, but Nightbitch doesn’t want me on its wavelength. This is a chained-up dog of a film growling at me while I pass its yard. “You’ll never get it,” the film says, glaring at me with murderous canine eyes.

I might believe my lack of motherhood renders me ineligible to offer compassion for what it broadcasts, except I can’t: I’ve watched a film with this message about the fractured identity and eternal apocryphal fatigue of motherhood devastate me. My muse, of course, would be 2018’s Tully, starring Charlize Theron and Mackenzie Davis. In Tully, Diablo Cody’s script engineers empathy with expert precision; like Heller, she champions the gritty dysfunction of parenting by invoking [[SPOILERS]] something akin to magic realism, but every decision has a purpose. I bawled at Tully and thought about my mother’s many sacrifices with lips that quivered until I got home; during Nightbitch, I dared say nothing lest Adams’ character might sic her pack on me.

Which is too bad. Adams remains a magnetic performer, and her stripped-down portrayal here ties imbues every shot with proof of the draining costs of her unpaid labor post-labor. Heller doesn’t trust Adams to let her expressive bloodshot eyes invite us to understand; she’s constantly narrating like the script was lifted directly out of a novel without adaptation. Everything in this script is awkward, sacrosanct, and so aggressively on the wet nose that I looked up the number for animal control. And don’t even get me started on the cartoonish depictions of professional artists (that basically gets thrown out at the end for…reasons).

Admittedly, there was a part of me that thrilled as the film progressed and refused to yield from its “Mothering makes monsters” message. There’d be guts in committing to hostility toward the demands of child-rearing…so of course, the film pauses to insist it’s not the child but the role, as though we hadn’t already repeatedly seen Adams pouring from an empty cup to delight her son. Instead, it buries all of its intensity at the end in exchange for a Milkbone of compromise, communication, and a groveling husband who sees the error in his ways while sweeping a warehouse moments earlier full of moms bonding over the animals they murdered.

Reflecting now, I wonder if this film got chopped to pieces; its 98-minute runtime felt a tad slight for its premise, and there were jarring cuts and suddenly-central characters who leaped from NPC to VIP in a blink. Maybe a more expansive screenplay (or the novel it’s evidently based upon) did more with those extra square inches of canvas. There’s definitely something here because I cried at the end, albeit while certain I was crying because Adams so resembles a brilliant friend who wants to be a mother, and my heart broke thinking about what life bringing life into the world might strangle from her according to this movie.

 

 

Great films can make something specific feel universal, but even mediocre films manage that for me. I enter films wanting to empathize and connect and find personal truth in the story on screen. By that measure, Nightbitch ranks among the worst movies I have watched. Like a wild dog, it took my intended empathy, tore it apart like a wild skunk, and left it on my doorstep to rot.

WOOF.

I Saw the TV Glow (2024)

Originally published in Wildcat Weekly on November 22, 2025

 

Anyone who’s ever gotten into a show or received a mixtape can find something in I Saw the TV Glow.

For half of the film, Owen and Maddy (Justice Smith and Brigitte Lundy-Paine) are unlikely teenage friends bonding over a supernatural TV series called The Pink Opaque. Neither one fits in at their suburban high school; this one shared interest bonds them. That their interest features silly dancing baddies, fro-yo monsters, and pink glowing tattoos is beside the point. The show’s fictional midnight realm is their anchor to the real world.

The other half of the film challenges my adjective “real”. Is their show actually their past? Are Tara and Isabel characters on the Young Adult Network or proxies for Maddy and Owen? Who actually is Maddy and who actually is Owen? Years later, when the two reunite, fact and fiction blur into a surrealist slurry of neon pink nineties nostalgia and abject terror over what’s underneath each character’s surface.

Marketed by A24 as an intellectual horror film, I’m selling it to you as a mystery. After four watches and hours of discussion and rumination, that feels like the fairest pitch. I Saw the TV Glow is arthouse fare where the color of the giant tarp matters. This won’t be to every person’s tastes; for some, its cilantro will taste like black-light soaked soap.

But the mysteries in Jane Schoenbrun’s film beg to be unraveled. Viewers will hypothesize over the surface-level mysteries of what happened and what’s real, but the true mysteries are deeply personal. This is a film about transformation but also the tragedy of fearing transformation. At one point, Owen says “It feels like someone took a shovel and dug out all my insides,” but that somber self-awareness isn’t authentic—he’s too afraid to look inside himself and discover he’s buried something his entire life. But what could it be?

If this all sounds a bit cryptic, that’s my presentation, not the movie’s. Even if you don’t recognize the tarp’s colors, the film wears its metaphors like a glowing pink tattoo. Characters tell you what’s really happening; they talk about TV shows and industrial freezer hearts, but that’s Schoenbrun varnishing the film with a popular media finish. Ultimately, this is a surrealist story about an old teen TV series, but it’s also a highly personal story about the treacherous veering path to self-acceptance some among us traverse.

I Saw the TV Glow probably isn’t a film to throw on while digesting turkey, but nobody wants or needs my help identifying crowd pleasers. This is a gorgeous, challenging film to inspire introspection and empathy. No film from 2024 has stuck with me more than this one.

No film from 2024 begs to be shared more, either.

 

Conclave (2024)

Originally published in Wildcat Weekly on November 8, 2024

As the facilitator at Diamond Day, I need to believe that powerful, transformative change can happen in a singular confined space. I tell the participants that we want the day to feel like a day apart from school and the rest of their lives. I call it a bubble; what’s learned there leaves there, but what’s said there stays there.

 

Released two weeks ago, director Edward Berger’s Conclave traces its story around a similar principle. Substitute the generously-shared small gym for the musty annals of the Vatican and you have your tight quarters; instead of 140 students, staff, and alumni, drop in 110 Cardinals gathered together to vote for and elect a new Pope.

 

Like Diamond Day, Conclave is full of twists and turns. You can feel the foundation being laid for unexpected intrigue in both. At Diamond Day, it’s the interjected “If you really knew me” phrasings and the emotional hiccups that crop up out of nowhere. In Conclave, its the factions forming and whispered questions. Did the Pope fire him? Who appointed that Cardinal? Who paid for her flight? At Diamond Day, I as facilitator must stay ahead of the proceedings, anticipating needs and adjusting intended sequences; in Conclave, someone is always seemingly ahead, turning the crank, but it’s never clear who—and when it is, control lurches suddenly. The clergymen voting, squabbling, and backstabbing are nearly all old, wrinkled, and gray, but they connive like men half their ages.

 

Granted, that last bit severs the tenuous parallel I’ve cast between our wellness workshop and a film about church leaders grasping for power. Really, there’s no reason to connect the two at all: our tie-dyed shirt bears little resemblance to the cardinals’ cassocks, and our goal is empowerment for all rather than for elevating one purportedly “reluctant” man to the papacy. They’re fundamentally different.

 

Except for one thing. When students attend Diamond Day for the first time, they often have no idea what’s coming. One student last year confessed to thinking it was all-day homework help; another was certain we’d be playing soccer. When they sit down in their folding chairs, they have no idea what they’re about to see, hear, or feel.

 

That part resembles Conclave. I watch a lot of movies, and I think a lot about story structure; I relish anticipating the progression of any film, show, or novel I jump into. During the second half of Conclave, you can feel the thing building to something as Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, and the rest of the cast ratchet up their frustration and paranoia—but you can’t tell when or how the shoe will drop. The story keyed me up as much as any action movie despite the screen being dense with creaky-kneed elder statesmen in cumbersome garb. I expected light intrigue and some behind-the-hymns glimpses of the Vatican in a stodgy drama, but I watched a pulpy thriller on-screen.

 

Conclave won’t be for everyone, especially with the way the story uses real issues affecting real people as glorified props for its characters’ posturing, and some will prefer the globe-trotting rush of The DaVinci Code or Angels and Demons over the claustrophobia of Berger’s film. But I had a great time learning about this world and its players. Watching them tear one another down in the name of the Church entertained me.

 

Again, that’s very different from Diamond Day, but still: while the workshop scratches an emotional itch, Conclave aims for the entertainment spot.

 

And delivers.