A Dark Ensemble Drama in Digital New York

One of the paradoxes about movies set in the digital age is that most of us now spend the majority of our time staring at screens, which is probably the last thing anyone actually wants to watch on another screen.

Filmmakers such as Timur Bekmambetov, who’s produced a handful of genre-driven “screenlife” flicks, including Unfriended and Searching, have attempted to incorporate that phenomenon into the aesthetic of the films themsleves, posing intriguing challenges for directors forced to limit the action to a single virtual display. But generally speaking, movies about people stuck in the digital vortex can be a bit of a drag to sit through, failing to offer the kind of escape many of us watch films for in the first place.

Writer-director Joshua Z Weinstein’s docu-style second feature, Here I’m Alive, is a screenlife movie of sorts, although it expands that concept into an ensemble piece set during one long and gloomy night in New York City. Following four characters, most of them glued to their phones or monitors for long stretches of time, it offers a realistic view of what it’s like to be young and financially strapped in the Big Apple right now, where online transactions and communications have supplanted doing things IRL.

Even when they’re not doomscrolling, the people in Here I’m Alive look like they’re floating in a pixelated haze — as if what matters most to them exists somewhere up in the cloud rather than down on the sidewalk. That’s surely true for many 20-somethings in our day and age, especially after the 2020 pandemic took a chunk out of their best teenage years. But that doesn’t necessarily make for great drama, nor for something that’s even enjoyable to look at it.

Weinstein, who also serves as DP, gives his film a moody, noirish look closer to 1976 than to 2026. He also captures his ethnically diverse cast with plenty of compassion. And yet none of that prevents this short feature, which chronicles several characters caught in the digital doldrums, from becoming a rather staid experience.

After starting out in the doc world, Weinstein showed how well he could immerse himself in a specific NYC community with his 2017 debut, Menashe, a moving small-scale drama performed in Yiddish and set in the Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods of Brooklyn. The director applies a similar approach to Here I’m Alive, whose depiction of the city’s online underground feels so authentic it could have been a documentary as well. And perhaps it should have been, because the dramatic states are otherwise low here — as are the cinematic stakes in a movie that mostly confines itself to screens and tight spaces.

Working with a group of non-professional actors, all of them convincingly playing characters based in part on their own lives, Weinstein weaves his young cast into a Short Cuts-style structure that tracks a quartet of people who vaguely cross paths in the city between the hours of 6 p.m. and midnight.

The protagonist of sorts is Majora (Cheyenne Gallagher), an avid gamer with a major case of agoraphobia that keeps him shut inside a Queens digital den for most of the movie. While some people — including billionaire guru Marc Andreessen, whom we see in an interview clip at the start of the film — may see such online purgatory as a paradigm of progress, Majora is aware of his issues and spends his time helping kids in similar situations, especially a fellow New Yorker (Alex Fox) contemplating suicide.

Majora’s tale frames a narrative that hops between other people his age scraping by in the naked city, finding both solace and grief in constant connectivity: There’s Krystaly (Krystaly Figueroa), who lives in a women’s shelter and tries to launch her own reality dating show inspired by Flavor of Love; Felix (Caleb Zuzga), who’s looking for a deep-pocketed sugar daddy to fund his need for lip injections, jaw and cheek filler and other facial retouches; and Eddie (Eddie Torrenegra), a Latino migrant who shoots upbeat Facebook content when he’s not delivering food around town. (There’s also trans model and beauty influencer Emira D’Spain of Next Gen NYC fame, but her plotline is practically nonexistent.)

Here I’m Alive cuts between the different characters as if they were in a multiplayer game about trying to make it in the Big Apple, struggling to pay the rent in a city that seems lonelier than it’s ever been, at a time when the wealth gap has risen to levels unseen since the Gilded Age. The problem is that the game they’re playing isn’t all that compelling to watch, even if it may represent a morosely honest reflection of what things are like nowadays, making us wonder: Whatever happened to the thrilling New York of On the Town? Or even of Midnight Cowboy? And where’s Travis Bickle when you need him?

Weinstein’s movie is frustratingly realistic, probably more than some of us would like to believe, capturing how the algorithms of Big Tech have ruined what used to be a great setting for great movies. The people in Here I’m Alive are so addicted to their screens for both personal and professional reasons, they can no longer experience New York at all. And even when they do experience it, they’re doing it through yet another screen. If the director offers up a glimmer of hope at the very end, showing how at least one character manages to see the light of day, his film deliberately leaves us in the dark.