REVIEW: Here - the digital de-ageing is horrid, but it's a beautiful film all the same

It’s impossible to sit in a building of a certain age without wondering about all the things that have happened down the decades in the room you are in. And that’s the premise of Robert Zemeckis’ distinctly odd, often irritating but actually rather brilliant Here.

There is plenty that is frankly annoying about the film, but it’s rather beautiful too after a disorientating start which throws too much at us too quickly and then plunges into all the horrors of digital de-ageing, surely one of the worst things that will ever happen to cinema.

The key focus in the film is on Tom Hanks and Robin Wright reunited more than 30 years after Forrest Gump. Sadly Zemeckis uses digital de-ageing to knock those years off them – rather than simply casting someone else in an age-appropriate way. Surely that would have been the sanest approach. But no, Zemeckis digitally undoes the decades – and the result, more so with Hanks than with Wright perhaps, is pretty grotesque. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do it especially when it leaves you wondering quite what you are looking at. Maybe it’s something we are just going to have to get used to, but the sheer unnaturalness of seeing Hanks living and breathing as he was 30 odd years ago feels definitely yuck for the moment.

But if you can get over that, then this is an intriguing film – the tale of one piece of land seen from one single fixed perspective across scores of years and through multiple occupants. Rather unnecessarily we fleetingly go back to the dinosaurs and an ancient tribe – before the house opposite becomes part of the estate of William Franklin, Benjamin Franklin's son. And then the main house is built and we go inside as the film jumps between the various subsequent stories across the years. Some are pretty weird: the flying ace who meets his maker, the over-enthusiastic chap who invents the reclining chair, and also the present-day family whose story is told far too vaguely. And then Paul Bettany and Kelly Reilly as parents to Tom Hanks who then marries Robin Wright. One way or another, we get birth, marriage and death in that room, all of life and the lack of it.

The editing is remarkable as the story flits between the time frames – and as the film progresses the flitting (a reflection presumably of the graphic novel on which it is based) draws you in and somehow stops being quite so annoying. And so the poignancy takes over. Here is among the best kind of films – the films that linger with you long afterwards. For all its faults, it’s certainly thought-provoking… and oddly affirming.