Fantasia 25' Lucy Fry checks into a motel where time has no rules in I LIVE HERE NOW.

There’s always been something eerie about those half-dead motels off the highway. In I LIVE HERE NOW, debut director Julie Pacino takes that creeping familiarity and drags it into a fractured world of memory, madness, and identity.

The film stars Lucy Fry (Night Teeth, Bright) as Rose, a struggling actress reeling from life-altering news right when a breakout opportunity with high-powered agent Cindy Abrams (played with steely precision by Cara Seymour) finally lands in her lap. But instead of stability, the chaos deepens—thanks in no small part to her overly attached situationship Travis (Matt Rife) and his suffocating mother (played by the legendary Sheryl Lee, channeling every nightmare mother-in-law trope with unsettling grace).

Rose escapes to The Crown Inn, a decaying roadside motel lost in time—and it’s here where I LIVE HERE NOW really begins to bend reality. Shot in lush 35mm and textured with jarring 16mm sequences, the film slides between eerie stillness and subconscious horror. Sleep paralysis, broken memories, and spectral figures plague Rose. One in particular: Lillian, a haunting presence brought to life by Madeline Brewer (Cam, The Handmaid’s Tale), who might hold the key to Rose’s past… or her complete unraveling.

Pacino’s debut is less a straightforward genre piece and more a sensory descent—a psychodrama laced with elements of ghost stories, fractured identity, and trauma that festers inside the body like rot in the walls of an abandoned room.

Fans of Mulholland Drive, She Dies Tomorrow, or Queen of Earth will feel right at home. But this isn’t mimicry. Pacino’s vision is her own—a hypnotic, slow-burning fever dream where moving forward means digging deeper into the things we swore we’d forget.

With a bold visual palette, a haunting original score, and a sharp lead performance by Fry, I LIVE HERE NOW cements Pacino as a fearless new voice in indie horror-tinged drama.