I'm Not Home (2026)

I'm Not Home is set across a single afternoon in Queens as we get up close and personal with two young men, Tilo and Rune, who have shared a decade-long ritual of collecting and listening to answering machine tapes from vintage stores across New York City.

This becomes the base layer for a sumptuous tale of intimacy, longing, and memory, as Parasco's beautifully crafted story weaves an almost noir-like narrative through a gorgeously shot film, while we try to pull together the strands of dialogue and body language to unravel their relationship. The opening shot of the film reveals several young men doing pull-ups on a frame, an image that immediately makes you think of Claire Denis' Beau Travail (1999); a reference that doesn't necessarily linger but is pertinent nonetheless. It's Tilo (Eli Brown) we meet first, swinging off the bars and making his way home to what we learn is his mum's apartment, only for Rune (Julian De Niro) to show up outside with bags of cassette tapes. They've not seen each other in five months, and what's not happened in between makes up the crux of I'm Not Home.

De Niro and Brown are sensational, pulling you into this relationship and giving it visceral beauty. There's a romantic innocence to an early scene in which Rune parades around in some clothes imitating a voice message whilst Tilo lies on the bed smoking, a brief few seconds of laughter that actually invokes Jean Luc Godard's À bout de souffle (1960), albeit without the harmless undertones of the nouvelle vague scene. We know there's something far deeper at work here.

Once a joint is sparked, we enter a nostalgic fever dream that's palpable in its reality, as snippets of dialogue reveal scraps of information about the pair alongside answering machine messages from strangers, many of which are relevant to the situation. This is where you're reminded of the work of Ira Sachs, most notably his stunning 2023 film Passages, which starred Ben Wishaw, who also earns a producing credit here. While Passages was a tale of piercing narcissism amid the rubble of desperate romance, I'm Not Home offers something more melancholy: perhaps an attempt to understand the fluidity of a friendship that once offered more, and an exploration of modern boyhood alongside it.

Parasco's film is hugely impressive, a work that transcends nostalgia and reality and explores everything in between, while maintaining a fiercely close proximity to the two leads, all set to a quite breathtaking ambient electronic score. As the credits roll, we hear street conversations in the background, perhaps suggesting the wall between the real world and the intimate reality of Rune and Tilo's inner conflict, one which we're utterly intoxicated by. ☆☆☆☆ 8.3/10