Here (2023, Bas Devos) (Patreon)

37/100

The cinematic equivalent of a Windham Hill album. (But not Breakfast in the Field. That one is good.) Initially, I thought Devos was erring on the side of bluntness—about 11 minutes in, Here's apparent protagonist (there are actually two), a Romanian expat in Belgium, stands on his apartment's balcony and says aloud, to himself, "This is my home," clearly because he's very much feeling otherwise. "THEME ANNOUNCED" reads my note, and then the other main character turns out to be a woman who studies how mosses respond to disturbances in their environment. (THEME REINFORCED.) But Devos really just wants to create and sustain a vaguely melancholy mood, anchored by tranquil interstitial nature shots that genuinely look as if they could become Windham Hill album covers, and that's all the film ever does. I found it maddeningly anodyne even at a mere 84 minutes, and would highly recommend it to Michael Fassbender's killer the next time he needs to get his resting heart rate down to 60bpm before pulling the trigger. Apichatpong Weerasethakul can successfully invest apparent placidity tied to inchoate longing with an arresting thrum; this is just...nice. Aggressively muted, if that's not too oxymoronic. A land acknowledgement of a movie, more interested in demonstrating that it cares than in actually accomplishing anything. (The preceding sentence is several orders of magnitude more provocative than this entire movie.) My friend Michael Sicinski, who specializes in avant-garde cinema and ought to be the target audience for an art film like Here, calls it "so recessive that it barely leaves a footprint" and says "It's going for gossamer, but to me it dissipates more like a vapor." (He also notes with bewilderment, which I share, that some people are praising the film for avoiding a romantic connection between its two leads after supposedly laying the grounds for us to expect one. Never occurred to me, either, Waz.) In short, add a 'W' at the beginning and a question mark at the end.