Nobody Knows I’m Here

This movie fucked me up. Not in a bad way, but like not in a good way. Like in a bad way, that’s good. You know what I’m talking about, like when you’re listening to a song and some lyric makes you think about something you haven’t thought about in a minute. Or it makes you realize something about life, or your life specifically. That shit fucks you up. I realized most of the movies I really like are basically just extended versions of that emotional experience. This movie made me cry, and songs make me cry all the time, which is kind of crazy when you think about it. Like this is someone else’s story, but it’s fucking me up. Like why though? Because that’s what storytelling does, or at least what good storytelling does. It tells this unique emotional experience, but in a way that is emotionally accessible to you. It’s intimate, but it’s also universal. That’s a seemingly simple concept, but it’s basically balancing opposites, which is a really hard thing to do. I think unsatisfying movies often lean too far towards one end of the spectrum; they are either trying to be so universally appealing that they lack originality, or they are trying so hard to be different that something just feels missing. I mentioned this balance in my last post because I think Portrait of a Lady on Fire achieves it to perfection, and Nobody Knows I’m Here (2020) comes pretty close.

Nobody Knows I’m Here is Chilean director Gasper Antillo’s first feature film, and it’s an insanely promising debut. One thing I’ve learned about film that I think is cool is the idea of “showing versus telling”, basically that characters should be revealed to the audience by what they do, not what they say. Many movies tell you a lot about their characters through dialogue or voiceover, but I think films that really focus on defining their characters by their actions are usually a lot more engaging and interesting. The dialogue in Nobody Knows I’m Here is sparse and pretty much everything you learn about Memo, the main character, is through showing. That’s how it is in real life; you are who you are because of what you do, not what you say. You can’t be like “I love myself!”, and then you love yourself. Well maybe you can, if you’re practicing daily affirmations, but that’s for another blog. Anyways, like many people, Memo has some trauma. Some fucked up shit happened to him when he was a kid that significantly impacted his life. The pain and strength in Memo’s story is why it is so effectively universal, and why it is such an important story to be telling. Check it out on Netflix!