I Live Here Now screened at Imagine Fantastic Film Festival, 31 Oct 2025
It is clear from the very outset that I Live Here Now will be preoccupied with matters gynecological, as a frightened five-year-old Rose (Lili Watkins) is laid down on a treatment chair, her legs strapped into stirrups by two nurses, while her mother is too distracted by a conversation with a man at the door to offer her daughter the comfort she really needs at this moment. “You won’t remember a thing,” the doctor (Robert MacReady) tells the little girl, standing between her thighs and about to insert a syringe into her vagina – and as we see the girl’s anguished face, there is a match cut to the adult Rose (Lucy Fry) looking bored and indifferent while her boyfriend Travis (Matt Rife) is enthusiastically going down on her.
The pain and trauma of that early invasive surgery have never really gone for Rose, whose resulting infertlility has left her feeling broken. As a Los Angeles actress in her thirties, Rose has noticed that the only parts she is now being offered to read now are “compliant, ‘Yes, dear’ mom rôles”, even though she is incapable of becoming a mother. She self-harms, and experiments with turning her leg-stirrup anxieties into sexual fetishes. Her age and body weight are crudely and humiliatingly assessed by the agent Cindy Abrams (Cara Seymour) – and then, as Rose starts preparing for a make-or-break audition, she discovers that she is, impossibly and miraculously, pregnant. With Travis’ terrifying mother Martha (Sheryl Lee) trying to take control of both Rose’s body and the child within, Rose flees to her home town of Idyllwild, obtains an abortion pill, and even as the hills are blaze with wildfires, seeks refuge at the Crown Inn to take her medicine and endure the ensuing discomfort.
At this point, writer/director Julie Pacino’s feature debut becomes something akin to Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (1961), Joel Coen’s Barton Fink (1991), Stefan Lernous’ Hotel Poseidon (2021) or Tallulah Hazekamp Schwab’s Mr. K (2024). For the Crown Inn is no ordinary hotel, but rather a subconscious space whose pink, uterine interiors stage Rose’s confrontation with the pains that she and other women carry, and with her will to assume agency and embrace change. This is an oneiric zone, where the concierge Ada (Lara Clear) resembles Rose’s aloof mother, the porter Sid (Sarah Rich) Rose’s vulnerable inner child, and the only other guest Lillian (Madeleine Brewer) Rose’s appetitive id and capacity for cruelty. With the heat rising all around, Rose is engaged in a conflict with different aspects of herself – and as she struggles to find a way out of the hotel, she is also seeking to escape both the physical confines of her own body, and the predicament and pressures of womanhood itself.
Told in five storybook-like chapters, and unfolding mostly in rooms, corridors and crawlspaces accommodating no male staff or guests, I Live Here Now approximates what used to be called a women’s picture, while gradually acquiring an otherworldly surrealism and abstract interiority that are very much sui generis. Meanwhile, in this otherwise suffocating, infernal microcosm, the focus on choice and bodily autonomy as sources of empowerment all at once evokes Carlo Mirabella-Davis’ similarly themed Swallow (2019), and serves as a response to Trump’s regressive, post-Roe America, making Rose’s (possibly lifelong) stay at the Crown as much a political as a psychological residency. For Rose is only taking time out to work through how to be herself in a world seemingly bent on constraining and controlling, diminishing and demeaning women – and that world, in the end, is a place where we all have to live now.
strap: Julie Pacino’s surreal hotel-set psychodrama checks its heroine into a psychological space shared with the traumas of womanhood
© Anton Bitel
