“I’m trying to say this the right way,” is one of the messages that we hear in Elena Parasco’s I’m Not Home, a film robust with its emotions and its regrets.
There is something so special about a blinking light on an answering machine. The light was almost always bright, almost obnoxious, red, and knowing that there was a digital message in a bottle waiting to be heard conjures many emotions. Maybe you are afraid that there is bad news or maybe you will find out something exciting. Messages left on an answering machine always carried the weight of anticipation, and Parasco uses that to great effect in her film. Even if no one has an answering machine anymore, those messages are still alive.
Eli Brown and Julian De Niro play Tilo and Rune, two lifelong friends who reconnect after an unspoken estrangement. They get high together and listen to old answering machine messages as the emotions and relationship between hangs in the room as the smoke dissipates. Do they recognize something between them in the voice of someone else? Do they hear desperation, affection, and sadness the way that they feel it for each other?
Even though we don’t see the younger versions of these men, the spirit of them is tangible in every moment, and it’s different from when we first see Tilo hanging with the boys outside in the opening moments of the film. They roll around in a moment of playfulness before a haircut later in the film accentuates a sense of touch. Parasco and I speak about a gesture on a motorcycle that is full of longing.
I’m Not Home digs into our own thoughts of memory and the things we thought we should have said. If someone was taken from you, would you regret words left in the silence? If you had two minutes left to say something meaningful, would you be able to find the right words?
