A television switches on. A mind snaps. A man discovers his murdered wife. As he stares at her lifeless body, the events leading to her death play before him, like in a movie. "HERE" follows the journey of He Zhiyuan, a middle-aged man who struggles to make sense of his reality. Reeling from the sudden death of his wife, he loses the will to speak and is interned at Island Hospital. There, he meets strident kleptomaniac Beatrice with whom he forms an inexplicable bond. As he adjusts to life within, he is selected for an experimental treatment, which forces him to confront the devastating truth behind his past, present, and future. Meanwhile, a filmmaker visits Island Hospital to document the lives of the staff and patients.
We love Wong Kar-Wai's movies, but he is not without his excesses, like shooting a movie without a script and treating his actors like props, as he formulates the different possible permutations in his mind. The worst thing is when a newbie filmmaker, desperate to emulate his idol, thinks he can do what Wong does, which more often than not, results in pretentious garbage that neither narratively sound nor aesthetically pleasing.
This is one of them. It's damning praise when the best thing about a film is the sound design, but honestly, that's the one bright spark that stands out in a non-movie that's a pretentious critic's wet dream. No narrative, check. Ugly shots, check. Pseudo-intellectual artistic statements, check. Theme that's actually quite easy to grasp, but entirely not worth the effort of grasping, check.
OK, there's one good sequence, which is fake archival footage ostensibly shot in the mental hospital. Too bad even that is cribbed from actual archival footage shot in the US in the 1940s - the actors emulate almost the exact same movements, and in many instances, the camera position chosen is exactly the same. Do a search online for the "Prelinger Archives" and look for the documentary short "Symptoms of Schizophrenia", and you'll see what I mean.
This sort of pretentious garbage is apparently what gets you film grants and gets foreign critics all excited. This state of affairs is an insult to those who work at their craft. You might have a right to make "art" for "art's sake" (though I'd argue that bad art shouldn't be considered art), but you have no right to con me out of the hard-earned money I paid for my ticket. If I could give it zero stars, I would.
