Robert Zemeckis’s Here proves that a filmmaking gimmick does not a good movie make. Billed as a Forrest Gump reunion with Tom Hanks and Robin Wright joining the director, it fails to land either storytelling-wise or emotionally.

Shown from the standpoint of a room in a house somewhere in the United States, Here is a snapshot of all the families that have lived in it over the years. Unfortunately it remains as snapshots, like pictures on a gallery wall showing the passage of time, which never gives us enough of the picture to connect with the subjects.

The narrative, which starts with the extinction of the dinosaurs (!) mostly rests on one family — war veteran Al Young (Paul Bettany) and his wife Rose (Kelly Reilly) and their eldest son Richard (Tom Hanks) and his wife Margaret (Robin Wright) as they navigate life’s ups and downs. But it also transitions to other eras including a time when the Lenni-Lenape people lived on the land to the colonial era when the land belonged to the estate of William Franklin, Benjamin Franklin’s illegitimate son, to the early 20th century right through to the modern times.

Each era is captured from the perspective of one window through which we see the world change. It is an exciting concept which is executed through window-like blocks, sometimes square, sometimes rectangular, that show the transition from one era to another. But it soon loses its novelty and becomes ever so confusing. The film spends hardly any time with the other characters — an indigenous couple billed in the credits as Indigenous Man and Indigenous Woman, aviation-obsessed John Harter and his wife Paulinean in the early 20th century, inventor Leo and pin-up model Stella Beekman in the 1940s and Devon and Helen Harris who navigate the Covid-19 pandemic. As a result, none of their stories of love, loss and joy has any emotional impact.

We do spend a lot of time with the Youngs, from the moment Al and Rose buy the house till Richard sells it after his divorce from Margaret. We see marriages, pregnancies, childbirth and death in that one room but none of it evokes much emotion. Hanks and Wright do well with the parts they were given but the de-aging technology, which transforms them to teenagers, is too distracting, especially since their voices don't seem to have been changed. In fact, Bettany and Reilly’s relationship has more heart than that of Hanks and Wright, who go through the predictable teenage pregnancy, hurried marriage, the pressure to fend for the family and letting go of individual dreams till their separation.

But all of them feel like they are in an art installation going through the motions without any emotional investment, till the very end of the one-hour-45-minute film, by which time it’s too late.

It could have been a poignant tale of love, loss, birth, death, joy and grief but the narrative gets the short shift in the film's focus on experimentation with technique and that’s where it becomes dull and boring.