this mawkishly sentimental adaptation has lost the brilliance of Richard McGuire’s graphic novel

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.

In the graphic novel, the intersecting and overlapping moments of different eras inhabit nearly all of the double page spreads of the 300-page book. This encourages the reader to make comparisons and connections between different time periods. But the film only shows these fragments of other times at the end of each scene, as a transition to the next.

This means the movie often focuses on scenes of romance and melodrama, rather than the intriguing moments of humanity in play and conflict found in the graphic novel’s panels. Memorable images and lines of dialogue from the graphic novel are kept occasionally, but the expansion of micro-vignettes into much longer scenes often drags the film into mawkish sentimentality.

Split-screen cinema

In our research, we’ve compared the book Here with other graphic novels – One Soul by Ray Fawkes (2011) and From Hell by Alan Moore (1998). In these books panels set in different periods act like a time machine for the reader.

In From Hell the act of reading these panels reinforces the novel’s claim that “time is a human illusion”, as readers jump instantly between images of Victorian London and the present day.

Films and TV shows that use similar split-screen effects to depict different time periods are rare. Some notable examples include The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), Sisters (1973), Dressed to Kill (1980), Kill Bill Part One (2003) and the second series of Squid Game (2024). The technique is usually used to create tension when moments in different locations play out simultaneously.

Even fewer films have used this technique for the entirety of their running time, as Here does. Some British directors experimented with it in the 1990s and 2000s in the films Timecode (2000), A.K.A. (2002), Prospero’s Books (1991), The Pillow Book (1996) and The Tulse Luper Suitcases trilogy (2003-4).

Through this technique, their directors aim the viewer’s attention at a particular image by letting the sound related to that image dominate. This prevents an assault on the audience by a cacophony of sounds from different periods as well as images.

At one point in Here, Zemeckis experiments with blending the sounds of multiple screens. A wedding scene is soundtracked by an insert of The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan show, which continues from the preceding vignette.

For this scene, the inset image stays on screen much longer than any other example in the movie. This is closer than any other scene to the style of the original graphic novel. But in general the constant contrast of startling images which makes the book of Here so memorable is severely underused in the film adaptation.

When interviewed in 2015, McGuire noted how the book uses images in repetitive ways that are like melodies and leitmotifs found in jazz. As such, a soundtrack that also mimicked this kind of musicality could have worked well in the film.

Hauntings

One scene in Here shows the son of Hanks’ character Richard Young dressed as an old-fashioned ghost under a sheet with eye holes.

Ironically, a film which better exemplifies the theme and circular time frame of Here than Zemeckis’s adaptation is David Lowery’s A Ghost Story (2017). In it, a similarly attired character finds themselves trapped in both the future and past of a house after they die.

The film of Here, the graphic novel, and McGuire’s original 1989 short comic strip are all about fragments of time that are haunted by similar moments in the past, or which predict similar moments in the future.

In his graphic novel, McGuire suggests a futility to humanity’s existence by showing a Jurassic landscape that precedes us and the post-apocalyptic world that follows us.

Zemeckis’s film also shows dinosaurs and the ice age preceding the dawn of mankind – with the majority of the film set in the 20th century – but he omits the scenes set in the future. Despite this, his film’s eventual tragedy of lives that end, generation after generation, is ultimately more melancholic than the graphic novel.

In McGuire’s work, there is a joy in the minutiae. The repetitions of the house’s layout and inhabitants’ dialogue suggest communal experiences and shared meanings between our lives.

The film, however, rarely allows the viewer to see such a kaleidoscope of moments on screen at the same time. Ironically, the trailer does this more than the film itself, embracing the possibilities of the format, rather than just flirting with it.

Zemeckis mostly removes the playful multiplicity of overlaying moments that make the comic so unique. This prevents the film from presenting the same sort of uplifting tapestry of moments we see so beautifully on the graphic novel page.