Director Robert Zemeckis’s new film Here is adapted from the comic strip turned graphic novel of the same name by Richard McGuire. It tells the non-linear story of the inhabitants of an American house throughout multiple time periods, from one fixed point of view – a corner of the living room.
Like the graphic novel, the film uses inset frames – small oblong windows of different moving images with a white border. They are placed over a larger main image to show the same physical location during different fragmentary moments in time. However this technique isn’t used nearly as frequently as in the book.
Paul Bettany, Tom Hanks and Robin Wright play the same characters – members of a family that have lived in the home since the 1940s – from their 20s through to old age. To show their lives progressing throughout the years, the film makes distracting use of digital ageing and de-ageing.
