Fantasia 2025 Review: I LIVE HERE NOW, The Mothers Are Not All Right

Rose is in a state of quiet panic. The young (but no longer young) actress receives a last-minute opportunity, a part for which the no-nonsense casting agent -- played by a delightfully wicked Cara Seymour, who smokes cigarettes like she means it -- has told her to drop a few pounds over the weekend, and get back to her with a fast-tracked audition tape. 



This happens on same day that Rose finds out she is pregnant from her callow, unserious, boyfriend, with the mother from hell. Twin Peaks’ Sheryl Lee vamps it up here in a small role, in a scarlet dress and a glass-box modernist home straight out of The Lost Highway. For better or worse, Lynchian shenanigans abound.



Intent on commandeering Rose’s pregnancy in the vein of protecting her son, she attempts to force Rose to use her own doctors. Rose flees to an abortion clinic to obtain a pill that will end the pregnancy after, ‘a few days of harsh bleeding.’

Due to some medical condition when she was a child, involving some traumatic surgical procedures, Rose is not supposed to be able to get pregnant, so the whole fucked up situation is both a miracle and a curse. She has not had any luck with mothers, quite the contrary, and the ‘threat’ of becoming one is palpable.



The Crown Inn, hidden away in the forest of Idyllwild, California, is both her prison and salvation. A hidden place where she can deal with her problems in private, it is a garish, and hyperreal love-hotel drowned in every shade of pink, with an ancient television in the lobby and a well-sauced matron who says to Rose, “We will leave you to your mess.” Indeed. The hotel is also occupied by an eager to please porter, Cam, and Lillian, the resident disaffected bad-girl who oversteps her boundaries, being in the room next door. Cam and Lillian fight like sisters.



Julia Pacino’s debut film, I Live Here Now, is a kind of gothic inner-romance, full of childhood trauma, body issues, and psychological keyholes. It is a saturated fairy tale of self-therapy-by-fire. The painful birth of a new-you, built out of the anxieties,  projections, and flesh, of the old you.

It is the place where you are forced to go when you have nowhere else to go. Crowns feature prominently, for empowerment, duty, matriarchy, and a phrase for when the top of the baby’s head exits the mother’s body at childbirth. Indeed, all three of these things culminate in one signature moment.



Before it gets there, however, I Live Here Now, does flounder a bit from too much thrown at the wall — both literally, and figuratively. A desire to over-pack a first feature, perhaps, the opening moments simultaneously have too much and too little detail with Rose’s situation.

Things happen suddenly, which leaves one (or at least me) struggling to get behind Rose as person rather than a concept. In all the exaggerated chaos to follow, she can be somewhat of a blank slate. This may be by design, as fairy tales care not about a complex hero, but rather a surrogate (or perhaps a lesson) for the reader. It creates a space where things are more 'from a distance' than a the visceral experience that Rose is dealing with. 


When the film settles into The Crown Inn, the phantasmagoric production design takes over from mundane Los Angeles spaces. Pacino is never coy about The Crown not being a 'real' space, but rather the psychological hell-spa of Rose’s psyche. Plush and textured, and glittering with myriad unsourced refraction at times, the hotel is a body unto itself, with smoking orifices, and twisted duct work for Rose to squeeze through. The three other women who live there are facets of Rose.

Lucy Fry, who plays Rose, manages to take the character from a straight-faced, if only barely hanging on cope, to a full body exorcism. Even as I Live Here Now sometimes gets lost in its own whirlwind of symbols, signs, and caricature, it is an ambitious debut.