I Live Here Now (2025) by Julie Pacino - A Neon Nightmare in a Crumbling Mindscape

Short Summary – When Refuge Morphs into a Trap

Rose, a struggling actress, escapes to a remote, dilapidated motel to process unexpected and traumatic life news. But rather than offering solace, the Crown Inn turns into a surreal labyrinth where reality fractures, nightmares manifest, and the line between trauma and memory dissolves. The motel becomes not just a setting—but a reflection of Rose’s psyche, compelling her toward a reckoning with her most buried truths.

Link IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt31131384/

Link Review: https://variety.com/2025/film/news/julie-pacino-i-live-here-now-colorful-campy-fantasia-1236467478/

About movie: https://artakpictures.com/our-projects/i_live_here/

Link to watch: (industry professionals): https://pro.festivalscope.com/film/i-live-here-now

Detailed Summary – A Mind Unraveled in Flaming Hues

• Rose—played by Lucy Fry—is hit with life-altering news at a pivotal career moment. While an audition with agent Cindy Abrams looms, Rose confronts an unexpected pregnancy and pressure, especially from her boyfriend Travis’s overbearing mother, Martha (Sheryl Lee), pushing her to conceal and control.

• Seeking escape, Rose checks into the Crown Inn—a seemingly ordinary motel that slowly reveals itself as a surreal, shifting space. With flickering lights, heart-shaped keys, and ever-changing room assignments, the Inn warps around her, echoing emotional unrest.

• The motel’s occupants—Lillian (Madeline Brewer), Sid (Sarah Rich), and others—act as both hosts and fragments of Rose’s trauma. Each character seems to embody parts of her psyche: suppressed anger, innocence, or risk, foiling the boundary between who they are and who she is.

• As Rose navigates pink-lit corridors and memory-scape rooms, the film blurs dream and reality. Her body reacts—through anxiety, sleep paralysis—as the motel reveals itself not as sanctuary, but anatomized memory. The journey becomes one of self-confrontation and visceral rebirth.

Director’s Vision – A Cinematic Dreamhouse of Trauma

• Julie Pacino’s feature debut blends psychological horror with surrealist expression. Drawing from Lynchian, Argento, and Coen-esque aesthetics, she constructs a visual language where trauma takes physical form. 

• Using 35mm and 16mm film, and a carefully designed soundstage, Pacino builds a world that’s tactile yet uncanny—every lampshade, wallpaper pattern, and color choice charged with emotional intention. 

• Pacino conceptualizes the Crown Inn as both character and mindscape—an environment shaped by Rose’s fears, guilt, and yearning for control. Her direction insists on feminine interiority uncontained by conventional narrative. 

Themes – Memory, Trauma, and Reclamation

• Psychological incarceration versus refuge: What should be sanctuary becomes the site of confrontation with trauma-laden memory.

• Fragmented identity: The motel’s figures—from Lillian to Sid—mirror disparate parts of Rose’s unresolved selfhood.

• Making the immaterial tangible: Guilt, loss, and societal pressure manifest through design, lighting, and surreal performances.

• Feminist reclamation: Rose’s journey is about reclaiming autonomy—not just over her body, but her narrative and identity.

Key Success Factors – Expressive, Raw, and Fully Immersive

• Lucy Fry’s powerhouse performance: A tour de force of vulnerability, rage, terror, and eventual resolve—carrying the film’s emotional core.

• Uncanny production design: Bold, unsettling visuals—like the Valentine-colored suite—create both otherworldliness and emotional intimacy. 

• Atmospheric tone: Pacino’s deliberate pacing, haunting sound design, and dream logic placement sustain a sustained sense of disquiet. 

Awards & Nominations – Debut Emerges from Fantasia to Locarno

World premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival (Compétition Cheval Noir, July 2025), with further screenings at Locarno (August 9) and Edinburgh's Midnight Madness (August 17) — marking it as a standout debut at the major genre festivals. It also earned a nomination for Cheval Noir. 

Critics Reception – A Surreal Debut That Haunts

• Next Best Picture: Calls it a “nightmarish journey through the female psyche in all its broken, blistering, and beautiful complexity.” 

• Fantasia critics: Described it as a “dark and majestic work of psychological and body horror that refuses to hold back,” affirming Pacino’s assured direction. 

• Film Focus Online: Views it as a bold, emotionally unsettling meditation on identity and madness, prioritizing mood over linear plot. 

• Overall: The film earns praise for its stylistic audacity, emotional ferocity, and cinematic confidence.

Reviews – The Motel That Mirrors Trauma

• Nightmarish visual feast: Composed of surreal imagery (pink-lighted rooms, strange props such as a “pink Bible”), all serving as psychological symbols.ture

• Symbolic depth: Each motel space maps Rose’s internal struggle; the journey is as much about facing self as escaping space. 

Overall summary: The film stands as a challenging, sensory-rich portrayal of inward horror and emancipation, most potent when experienced rather than decoded.

Theatrical Release – From Fantasia to International Screens

• Fantasia International Film Festival: World premiere on July 24, 2025.

• Locarno Film Festival (Switzerland): Screening on August 9, 2025.

• Edinburgh International Film Festival (UK): Shown August 17, 2025. 

Why to Recommend Movie – A Surrealist Unveiling of the Psyche

• Fear through beauty: Drops the horror façade, replacing it with haunting, stylized introspection.

• Female interiority unfiltered: Tackles themes of motherhood, performance pressure, and bodily autonomy with unflinching honesty.

• Debut bold beyond precedent: Pacino emerges not as an inheritor of legacy, but as an original creative with a cinematic voice of her own.

• Visual as emotion: The film doesn’t explain—it embodies psychology through environment, performance, and tone.

Movie Trend – Dream Logic in Feminine Horror

Joins a wave of psychological horror films that foreground mood, symbolism, and female interior worlds—channeling Mulholland Dr., Black Swan, The Love Witch, and Persona-like sensibilities. 

Social Trend – Trauma as Spatial Architecture

Reflects growing interest in representing mental and emotional struggles as inhabitable spaces—making internal conflict visible, embodied, and spatially haunting.

Final Verdict – Trapped, Transformed, Triumphant

I Live Here Now plunges you into a vivid, dreamlike crucible of feminine expression, memory, and survival. Julie Pacino's debut transforms the motel into a hall of fractured reflection, and Lucy Fry's tour-de-force anchors it in humanity. This is horror made personal—haunting, empowering, and unforgettable.