‘Here I’m Alive’ Review: ‘Menashe’ Director Joshua Z. Weinstein Returns with a Microbudget ‘Magnolia’ for the Age of Hypernormalization

There are more than eight million stories in the naked city, but it increasingly feels like there’s only one: a dystopian anti-drama about how technology is weaponized against the ever-growing underclass with empty promises of connection and prosperity. Seduced along by the indifference of an infinite scroll, Joshua Z. Weinstein’s “Here I’m Alive” — his first feature since 2017’s “Menashe” — slurries together a handful of New York snapshots into a modest but salient mosaic of sex workers, shut-ins, and social media stars who frictionlessly crisscross into each other’s lives without looking up from their screens. 

The result is something of a microbudget, 76-minute New York “Magnolia” for the age of hypernormalization — a workaday drama that doesn’t argue “phones = bad” so much as it aspires to trace the invisible web of algorithms that have rewired how we see each other and move through the world. Its title inspired by a lyric from Radiohead’s “Idioteque” (an enduring masterpiece of manic doomerism), “Here I’m Alive” is bookended by its only didactic moments, both of which are cutting enough to earn their messaging. To wit: It opens on an ultra-pixelated YouTube interview with billionaire techno-optimist Marc Andreessen, but the computer screen fills with suicidal Discord messages as Weinstein’s camera zooms out. It seems that entrusting our future to Silicon Valley may not be the cure-all our thought leaders would have us believe. 

The desktop screen belongs to a man named Majora (Cheyenne Gallagher), who — like most of the characters in Weinstein’s ensemble cast — is a lightly fictionalized version of the first-time actor playing them. A sweet-natured agoraphobe who’s surrounded himself with a terminal of glowing computers in lieu of leaving his apartment (or ever wearing a shirt), Majora spends most of his time pirating Adam Curtis videos and offering his kind support to other shut-ins, one of whom is threatening to take his own life. In a loosely structured film that unfolds over the course of a single night on Earth, that threat will culminate in a crescendo of suspense, as well as the most high-stakes analysis of the porous relationship between online and IRL. 

Elsewhere, and somewhat more confusingly to my elder millennial understanding of how the internet works, a young woman named Krystaly — Krystaly Figueroa, real and riveting — juggles her shifts at Target with a live-streamed TikTok dating show(??) on which she auditions a variety of potential suitors. Weinstein’s panopticon-like approach doesn’t make time for much explanation, but context isn’t necessary to feel the whiplash of watching Krystaly go from low-status to high; she couldn’t be more vulnerable when pleading her case to a social worker, but when the phones come out she’s in a similarly constructed position of power. At least until the physical world exerts itself on her show. 

Early in the film, a Venezuelan migrant worker brings Krystaly and her friend some food, and — in a handoff typical of Weinstein and co-writer Brian Perkins’ overlapping attention — the camera follows the delivery guy away from the scene as the other characters complain about the state of their order. His name is Eddie (Eddie Torrenegra, whom Weinstein cast after seeing him at the Atlantic Center Chick-fil-A), he’s recognized on social media by some of the people who prepare his orders, and he’s striving for his two young kids to join him in America. FaceTime ostensibly makes it easier for him to be in their lives, but anyone who’s ever talked to their six-year-old on the phone knows that it only makes their absence that much sharper. 

On a slightly less precarious tip, the movie also introduces us to successful TikTok influencer Emira (Emira D’Spain, now seen on Bravo’s “Next Gen NYC” but shown here as a kind of mirage) and Felix (Caleb Zuzga), a sugar baby twink who’s convinced that he’s just one lip filler injection away from landing a daddy who will make all of his dreams come true. And maybe he is! For all of Felix’s naivete (and there’s a lot of it), “Here I’m Alive” is at its best and most unresolved when negotiating his vision of success, which feels equal parts both ridiculous and tantalizingly within reach. 

That paradox is a fitting condition for a film so determined to crystallize the “everything all of the time” feeling of life in a metropolitan technocracy (to complete the Radiohead stanza that inspired it). Weinstein’s dispassionately observational style, defined by slow zooms that stretch the city flat enough that it becomes almost two-dimensional, and conventional notions of upward mobility are rendered obsolete by new metrics of success. That feeling is suffused through every note of the film’s elaborate soundscape, which mesmerically combines a wealth of ambient noise with 20 original songs from DIY artists, all of them played diegetically across a meshwork of Bluetooth speakers and passing cars. Like the lives of the characters who comprise Weinstein’s mosaic, the music is both lovingly intricate and all too easy to ignore when the algorithm diverts our attention elsewhere. There is still hope for the future, this vital kaleidoscope of a movie suggests, but only if we don’t allow each other to be reduced into data.

Grade: B

“Here I’m Alive” premiered at the 2026 Tribeca Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

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