This indie begins with a numbingly abstract introduction, but once director Braden King introduces his central couple — Ben Foster as satellite cartographer Will and Lubna Azabal as expat Armenian photographer Gadarine— it becomes highly affecting, concerned both with the limits of mapping a landscape and with lovers’ difficulties in navigating each other.
The film shows a marvelous eye for the way travelers perceive a remote place, in this case Armenia. King has created an almost tactile movie, piling up exquisite details: the way the brain focuses on things seen from a car window, residents whose lives are suggested by what they are doing in a single instant, crumbling buildings as the well-dressed Gadarine walks to a fancy party.
The plot amounts to mapmaker-meets-photographer, they travel together and fall in love; but to those elements Foster and Azabal add immense charisma and chemistry. The overture to the romance is particularly lovely, as Will and Gadarine meet over breakfast.
He’s eyeing her, but when she drops her photos and he moves to pick them up and sees how good they are, Will truly becomes smitten, and she with him. Their later coupling — fully dressed after a half-naked swim in which they scarcely put a hand on one another — is fiercely passionate without so much as a button unbuttoned.
The slow, methodical pace of “Here’’ will undoubtedly drive a few viewers crazy. But for those in tune with its quiet rhythms, it’s worth the journey.