When it comes to meta experiments that blur those good ole lines between fiction and the filmmakers’ own non-fiction life stories, there’s a risk that the resulting feature can border on being impenetrable if audiences aren’t fed a load of exposition in advance. That’s far less of an issue for classically-told narratives from mega-famous artists delving into (semi)autobiography ( like Steven Spielberg with “The Fabelmans” ), but definitely so for smaller scale projects from independent filmmakers whose output is more peculiar. What can be a compelling behind-the-scenes story as described in a press kit may not necessarily translate into the finished feature as something engaging, or even coherent, to anyone coming to the work without the luxury of reading production notes before the screening.
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This is thankfully not the case with “Invention,” a compact, compelling and warm fiction and documentary hybrid, credited as “A film by Callie Hernandez and Courtney Stephens”: both women wrote the script together, the former also stars in it, and the latter directs.
Hernandez made her screen debut as ‘Space Babe’ in “Machete Kills,” though her first role was an ultimately uncredited appearance in Terrence Malick’s long-delayed “Song to Song”. Since then, she’s undeniably popped more as an ensemble highlight in both studio movies and weirder independent fare from exciting auteurs. Alongside fellow later breakout stars Jessica Rothe and Sonoya Mizuno, she’s one of Emma Stone’s singing pals in an early number in Damien Chazelle’s “La La Land”; she almost makes it to the end alive in both Ridley Scott’s “Alien: Covenant” and Adam Wingard’s “Blair Witch”; and she’s bewitched both Andrew Garfield in David Robert Mitchell’s “Under the Silver Lake” and actor-directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead in “The Endless”.
Director Courtney Stephens, meanwhile, has amassed a formidable body of experimental and non-fiction work, including the 2021 feature “Terra Femme,” an anthology of unrelated travelog footage filmed by women from the 1920s to 1950s, patched together by the filmmaker to explore, among other topics, the role of documentation in our lives. Stephens’ work is rooted in the wide-ranging possibilities of archive material, making her the perfect collaborator for this project reportedly conceived by Hernandez.
“Invention” fictionalizes the immediate aftermath of Hernandez’s own father’s death, which happened in the fall of 2021 – one line alluding to Covid skepticism suggests a similar date for the film’s narrative. Hernandez’s dad, an alternative health doctor, made several TV appearances in the 90s through to as late as 2020, with VHS recordings of these broadcasts making their way into “Invention” from the very start. Hernandez stars as a woman – amusingly named Carrie Fernandez – coping with the death of her estranged inventor father, who’s only ever glimpsed through the aforementioned archive footage.
Meeting with an executor (James N. Kienitz Wilkins), Carrie learns that several investment deals gone awry means that various parties may be able to make a valid claim for her dad’s estate. That said, the old man had set up a separate trust fund to ensure that Carrie would be left with something: a patent for an experimental healing device. The invention was recalled by the FDA and is in legal limbo. This is to be Carrie’s sole inheritance, apart from the key to a room at her father’s home that contains one model of the device.
Visiting the town where he lived (in part to sell his house), Carrie meets up with locals who had business relationships with her father. Many of these lightly comic encounters involve Carrie showing up at people’s stores or homes, introducing herself as the doctor’s daughter, usually hearing a description of her dad as some embarrassingly eccentric character, and then bluntly delivering the news that he’s died.
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One invested party, Babby (Lucy Kaminsky), shows up to the deceased’s house in search of guidance, only to be devastated by Carrie’s news. A devoted believer in Carrie’s father’s attempts at harnessing the healing power of energetic frequencies, this visitor opines that the dad may have been killed because of the world-changing potential of his findings and creations. Hernandez’s real father was apparently conspiracy-minded, and from this early conversation scene onwards, the lo-fi dramedy deftly explores the idea of grief as a catalyst and container for conspiratorial thinking; the ways in which fantastical construction is the easiest or sometimes only way we can process loss.
Carrie is presented as a woman without any faith in belief systems, fringe or mainstream, emphasized in particular during one of the film’s most humorously awkward sequences: where the Christian boss (Joe Swanberg) at a manufacturing workshop coaxes Carrie to kneel with him on his office floor to say a very long prayer for her continued well-being, having established that she’s not married and so wouldn’t have anyone else to pray for her. Hernandez’s poker-face approach to her onscreen surrogate works wonders for the film’s dry comedy, making it all the sweeter when Carrie creases up at bad jokes during a post-coital scene with a local antique shop employee (Sahm McGlynn) she bonds and hooks up with. And all the more poignant when her tears finally come.
“Invention” may have the narrative tropes of many a grief drama we’ve seen before, but the experience is altogether more unique thanks to Stephens’ shape-shifting, increasingly abstract approach. Apart from the archive footage peppered throughout, “Invention” is shot on Super 16mm, with Stephens implanting captivating effects-based sequences between conversations, with imagery that could be dreams or the product of Carrie’s father’s medical invention, if it really does work.
Elsewhere, the image of a lit red candle will occasionally precede or close scenes, the accompanying audio referencing the construction of the film itself. For example, before we first see the executor, we hear Kienitz Wilkins mistakenly call Carrie “Miss Hernandez”, before being corrected to say “Fernandez”. At other times in these spaces in between scenes, we hear actors comment on the material, with Hernandez elaborating on real autobiographical details when prompted by her scene partners.
Where “Invention” goes in the final sequences of its only 72-minute runtime is perhaps not the most obviously satisfying conclusion, favoring transcendence through escalation of its atmospheric tricks over Carrie finding a definitive path forward. But how often does the grieving process ever really involve unambiguous answers? During one of those fourth-wall-breaking interludes, Joe Swanberg can be heard saying, “We’re making an improvised film, we’ve got to let the magic happen.” He’s responding to Hernandez messing around and making some music for herself in between takes, but it’s an apt comment regarding the whole project’s successes. This is an open-hearted, playful and perceptive film that does achieve its own sort of magic in seeing just how far you can test the boundaries between metafiction and explicit documentary.
Grade: B+
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