‘Invention’ (2024)

‘Invention’ follows Carrie (Callie Hernandez), a young woman coping in the aftermath of the sudden passing of her father, a New Age health guru who had spent his life promoting and selling pseudomedical paraphernalia and who had later delved deeper into more conspiratorial territories.

In the process of tying up her father’s affairs Carrie goes to a funeral home, speaks with his executor, visits a handful of investors who had contributed to her father’s ventures and even comes across a former patient of her father’s alternative medicine practices.

Putting her fathers matters in order, the executor (James N. Kienitz Wilkins) informs Carrie her father had left behind him a disorganized and indebted estate, leaving her only a patent for an untested electromagnetic device, which the FDA had rejected as a medical device. Carries decision on whether to keep the patent hinges on her curiosity and want to discover more about who her father was.

Hernandez’s Carrie seeks to fill in the gaps on her father’s character. By contacting the people he was in business with, meeting with associates and encountering a former patient, Carrie comes across a peculiar assortment of individuals. Each more curious than the last, every person appears more or less susceptible to some form of conspiracy, with Carrie’s father having charmed them to his way of thinking, selling an alternative view on life, medicine and thinking.

Fleshing out Carries understanding of her father, Hernandez presents a woman grieving the loss of a parent who had left her life years ago. Detached and introspective, her discovery of her father’s character through the people he had influenced in his lifetime fill out the image of who he was.

Reserved and showing little emotion until the penultimate moments of the feature, Hernandez purges the pent up grief, anger and resentment she had harboured towards her father, indicating that the grieving process will run its course regardless of how broken down the relationship between the two had been.

Presented via a composition of archival footage from the 90’s, home videos, loosely scripted scenes, interloping low-resolution shots of the ‘invention’ and shots of a candle burning with voice-over from the crew rather than the characters, the film stands firmly in uncategorizeable territory.

Avant-garde and experimental, the archival footage delivers a sense of realism that adds credence to the very faithful and genuine exploration of the film director and writer Courtney Stephens and writer Callie Hernandez’s relationships with their parents.

Having both lost their fathers, one of whom was a New Age medicine guru, ‘Invention’ traps a very authentic sense of Hernandez’s Carrie seeking to find the essence of who her father was, ultimately unleashing a tear filled and panicked response to reality as her time with her father has come to an end.

With scripted scenes that perpetuate the authentic feel of Carrie’s journey, the film dares to supplement its tone with a layer of meta-documetary attributes, splicing in scenes of a burning candle where the director and actors voices can be heard discussing the filming process. Boosted further by shots of the ‘invention’ and psychedelic imagery, the film delivers a pastiche that amalgamates to expressing the unexpressable, namely Carrie’s journey though confronting the saddening and confusing process of grieving.

Squarely with its own voice, Stephens’ delivers an experimental journey of discovery. Whilst firmly grounded in reality, the film offers a sort of peek behind the veil of another person’s emotional make-up whilst also speculating on the character of another. Beautiful in it’s simplicity whilst paired with outlandish experimentalism, the film carries unhurriedly along through a journey of discovery peppered throughout with innovative artistic expression.

Score: 3/4