SCREEN | Gillian Jacobs Remembers 'I Used to Go Here'

"Life is not like school. It's not a safe place to try things out."

Gravitas Ventures / Pacific Northwest Pictures

Actor/filmmaker Kris Rey tackles undergraduate nostalgia in her post-adult dramedy I Used to Go Here. Starring Gillian Jacobs as a somewhat unremarkable author in a funk who's getting over her millennial malaise by revisiting her college glory days, the film offers plenty of insights about the pitfalls of real-life after leaving your safe educational bubble.

Rey dramatizes a very specific yet universal feeling of reaching a mid-level ceiling of success in the limbo before considering yourself a fully-grown and properly functioning adult. Jacobs' Kate struggles to take risks and establish her own original voice outside the confines of a closed environment like school. She lacks encouragement from her everyday life so when an invite to visit her alma mater comes, she jumps at the chance at being a big fish in a small pond again.

Rey populates I Used to Go Here with a plethora of familiar faces and funny voices. It's very possible Jemaine Clement was born to play a vapid professor just on the edge of harmlessly flirty and unquestionably inappropriate. The cast of mature yet very much growing undergrads in Josh Wiggins and Hannah Marks offer small but memorable turns as young mirrors of Kate.

Rey's film feels nostalgically familiar yet very contemporarily timely. I Used to Go Here's specificity in portraying identifiable experiences of maturity through your twenties, thirties, and beyond has a light freshness to its material. It certainly recreates the feeling of trying to live as your old self again.

I Used to Go Here is available to stream on various digital platforms and through video on demand.


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