THE STORY – A woman finds herself trapped in a remote hotel where the violent echoes of her past come alive, blurring the lines between her darkest nightmares and the waking world.
THE CAST – Lucy Fry, Madeline Brewer, Matt Rife & Sheryl Lee
THE TEAM – Julie Pacino (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 92 Minutes
With her ferocious and surreal debut, “I Live Here Now,” Julie Pacino (daughter of Al Pacino) delivers a psychodrama that vibrates like a panic attack in slow motion. It’s a film soaked in emotional gasoline and set ablaze by Lucy Fry’s gut-punch of a performance as Rose, a struggling actress, trauma survivor, and one of the most complex female protagonists in recent memory. At once hauntingly intimate and violently stylized, the film plunges us into Rose’s unravelling mind as she tries to reclaim her body, her career, and her sanity, all while a wildfire looms, her boyfriend’s mother turns tyrannical, and the lines between fantasy, memory, and reality dissolve like sugar in acid. Equal parts David Lynch and Dario Argento, “I Live Here Now” is a cinematic exorcism.
Premiering at the Fantasia International Film Festival, the film is divided into colour-soaked chapters as the film follows Rose navigating love and a career in Los Angeles. Playfully using colour in production design and lighting, the film begins with a sickly-sweet warmth: Rose and her boyfriend Travis (played by the new owner of the infamous Annabelle doll, Matt Rife) make love in a golden haze. The next scenes with Rose are blue and cold, as Rose meets with a producer for a role. She is told to lose three pounds in four days for an audition and won’t be bankable in a few years because of her age (Fry is 33), exposing the film industry’s treatment of women with razor-sharp clarity. Soon after, she learns she’s pregnant, a biological impossibility, she insists, due to a mysterious, invasive childhood surgery never documented in her medical records.
The mystery of the pregnancy unfurls alongside a deeper horror: Rose’s fractured identity. Her legs are marked with self-harm scars, her apartment walls plastered with Polaroid headshots of her in various looks, her sketchbook filled obsessively with crowns. Is the crown a symbol of worth, or a metaphor for the distorted expectations placed on women? Maybe both. The film never gives easy answers – only flickers of metaphor, drenched in vibrant reds, frigid blues, and dreamy pinks. Pacino and cinematographer Zoë White use colour and lighting not just for beauty, but to reflect shifting psychological states. It’s playful, yes, but also deeply precise.
Rose’s pregnancy causes immense conflict between her and Travis’s mother, Martha (Sheryl Lee). Martha gives off powerful matriarch energy, and it’s clear that she controls and abuses her son. Travis is told what to say and what to do, including that a baby with Rose could ruin his career. Martha tries to force Rose to see a doctor, so Martha can decide whether to keep the baby or not, without Rose in the picture. Rose escapes. Her body, her choice.
She flees the city, finding refuge at The Crown Inn. Here is where her mind takes full colour. Rose’s room – bright red and Valentine’s Day themed – is more than a refuge; it’s a mirror of her psyche. Behind the wardrobe doors, cigarette burns and marks echo her own scars. The Inn’s staff and Lillian, the Inn’s only other guest (a delightfully wacky Madeleine Brewer), seem more like fractured parts of Rose than real people. The deeper she stays, the more the Inn becomes unstable. Rose starts seeing things: flickering lights, Syd (Sarah Rich), the front desk girl, standing motionless in a hallway like a “Silent Hill 2” nurse, Lillian swallowing glass in a scene that is difficult to watch, but loaded with symbolism. The film whispers that the pain women carry often feels like a horror movie and a wound that cuts from the inside out. Dreams blur into reality. A door is marked “Anemone.” A symbol of the arrival of spring, and in turn, new beginnings, rebirth, and renewal.
The Crown Inn becomes a metaphor not just for Rose’s mind but for the internal palace built on pain, illusion, and resilience. Each character she meets feels like a version of herself she must confront – ghosts of trauma’s past. The film leans into horror, but never fully lands there; it’s psychological, emotional, and suffocating – a character study with the tension of a thriller and the kaleidoscope style of a lucid dream.
There are moments when the film feels unwieldy, its ideas sprawling like wildfire smoke into every vent. But that chaos feels intentional as Rose herself is untethered. It’s not just another “woman trapped in a strange place” story. It’s about being trapped in your own body, your own history, the roles society hands you. The final chapter sees Rose emerge like a superheroine – weathered, furious, but sovereign. Power reclaimed.
Lucy Fry deserves serious praise. She channels fragility, rage, confusion, and strength with physical and emotional intensity. Her performance is as layered as the film itself, tapping into trauma, horror, and finally, triumph.
For viewers willing to descend into Rose’s inferno, it’s a must-watch, nightmarish journey through the female psyche in all its broken, blistering, and beautiful complexity. Julie Pacino’s voice arrives bold and unafraid.
