©I Used to Go Here by Kris Rey (2020) — ©*I Used to Go Here* by Kris Rey (2020)

I Used to Go Here stars Community alumnus Gillian Jacobs and is directed by mumblecore royalty Kris Rey. Kate Conklin (Jacobs) is a struggling thirty-something writer whose book tour is canceled due to low sales. When asked by her former professor David Kirkpatrick (Jermaine Clement) to do a reading for his creative writing class at Illinois University —Kate’s alma mater— she jumps at the opportunity, eager to recapture the optimism and creative verve she had in her collegiate days.

While the comedy itself is broad, this bookish movie about bookish people couldn’t get much more niche. The impact it has on its target audience, however, is spot-on. Kate is a stand-in for viewers looking back at their own memories of college—especially those with artistic backgrounds. An interesting — albeit unfortunate — parallel can be observed with Kate’s struggles with low book sales and the hardships of the masses as a whole due to the pandemic, making the film a nice reprieve to look back at a simpler time where our entire lives were ahead of us.

Aside from that, I Used to Go Here cares little about its thematic significance. One may expect Kate’s book, Season’s Passed, to have some symbolism about her character or the film at large. However, the only commentary she gives on her work, how sexual consummation between characters is the expectation, and how restraint is valuable and realistic, doesn’t play out in the film itself. Instead, it seems merely like an artistic deconstruction taken straight out of Dawson’s Creek. While the quote, “just because a connection with a person doesn’t last forever, that doesn’t mean it’s not real,” has some ambition to it, it feels more like a plug-in for the trailer than an interpretation of—I don’t know—the relationship between Kate and her ex-fiancé, for example.

The revolving door of personalities that populate Kate’s days at Illinois seems to be Rey’s primary focus for the film. She keys into what makes these kinds of movies so good: having fully-fleshed characters within the scale of slice-of-life cinema. Just as Kate discovers the creative writing ecosystem at Illinois, we do the same, and it’s easy to visualize the lives of these characters both before and after the film’s setting. Thrown in are little details that creatives can relate to, like the professor’s note to cut the first page (or, as my professor would call it, “clearing your throat”) or the indie-rock soundtracked parties.

As Kate progresses through the weekend, she realizes that the passing of time has not fostered much change. She considers the experience as a second chance at life post-graduation: a chance to start again, a do-over. COVID-19, in a morbidly opportunistic way, has allowed us the same opportunity to reflect and maybe even regret. Perhaps, when it finally subsides, we’ll feel our own second comings to work towards achieving what we dream.

I Used to Go Here is now available to rent on VOD and streaming.