Here by Ho Tzu Nyen

Here is a film from Singaporean director Ho Tzu Nyen, who has already worked with theatre plays, visual arts and video experimentations. For his first feature, he has brought to the cinema some of the aesthetics from these other arts and put them together with the story of ordinary people in a psychiatric hospital; which allowed him to avoid the traditional construction of characters and to propose a version of the world seen through these people’s eyes.

The result is nearly indescribable. The rhythm is slow but tense; the narrative develops itself without ever having a clear conflict in it. The public is constantly reminded that it is watching a film, since the patients are seen while signing the contract to authorize the use of their image for this project; even if that ironically gives the film a realistic appearance – after all, the signatures suggest that at least the patients are real people instead of actors.

Here plays with realism and fiction, with overexposed light, high contrast and disturbing sound. It works as a sensorial experiment that intends to “make the public aware of its own body”, according to Ho Tzu Nyen. For that reason, as the patients register their traumas on “video-therapy”, the film is constructed as a therapy itself; as an attempt to register human behaviour in order to better understand it.

In the end, Tzu Nyen proves to be an ambitious director whose first feature shows an incredible degree of complexity and a deep reflexion on cinema and on human nature. For all those people who have been shocked by Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist, they should know that there are much more radical experiences in a room right next to them.

Bruno Carmelo