Invention: low budget meta experiment captures the uncanniness of grief
In Courtney Stephens and Callie Hernandez’s ethereal docufiction film, a young woman tries to learn more about her deceased father, starting with her only inheritance – his mysterious patent for a ‘healing device’.
Co-conceptualised by documentarian Courtney Stephens and actor-writer Callie Hernandez, Invention gives metafictional form to the all-consuming, inarticulable uncanniness of fresh grief. We encounter Carrie (several characters’ names are slight variations on their performers) dazedly navigating the bureaucratic blandness accompanying the death of her father. Attention turns to a black box which is to be her sole inheritance: the patent for “an electromagnetic healing device.”
A downcast New England autumn provides the backdrop for the talky encounters which follow, as a scattered cast of oddballs patchwork our (and, indeed, her) understanding of who this eccentric patriarch was. For some, he was a medical-tech revolutionary, for others a grifter, operating under pseudonyms and leaving a trail of botched business ventures, the “healing device” among them.
For all the improvisatory looseness of these interactions, the film is formally exacting, its organ-led soundtrack accentuating a thickly foreboding vision of a decaying, untrusting America. An empathetic, but never condescending, portrait develops of the common desire to place faith in mavericks and their clean-cut solutions: what some might call conspiracies. Stephens and Hernandez allow microbudget limitations to intensify the film’s trepidatious off-ness. Its mostly static 16mm photography – often shot from behind – is suggestive of 1970s conspiracy thrillers, but otherwise it has all the hallmarks of its 2020s American microbudget milieu (indie filmmaking peers such as James N. Kienitz Wilkins and Joe Swanberg make memorable cameos).
Interludes consisting of archival advertisements and home videos sharply punctuate the main plot, showing Hernandez’s own father – the unambiguous reference for the film’s ghostly central figure – hawking alternative medicines on a late-1990s cable TV channel.
Stephens is known for non-fiction films rooted in appropriated footage. While Invention represents a sharp pivot into genre-inflected fiction, these moments of intermedia reflexivity bring its central conceit to life. The film’s other documentary sleight-of-hand is to include audio of conversations made post-filming. These both underline the artifice of the film’s paranoia, and provide insight into the emotional impact of using collaborative storytelling to work through intense personal loss.
The fictional Carrie remains a cipher throughout, embodying the film’s tone of oneiric numbness: might this all be taking place inside some daydream? One of Invention’s few releases of drama arrives in its final moments, with her cathartic wails of bereavement. The ‘invention’ of the title turns out to be a macguffin, and Carrie’s mission to make sense of it a mere side quest. In her journey toward being able to grieve fully, she also experiences the pitfalls of seeking comfort in easily-graspable narratives – whether in the form of conspiracies or in her need to attain a full picture of who her father was. Perhaps in matters of death and mourning, the need for explanation itself is the ultimate red herring.
► Invention is screening at the ICA London now.