The secret art of human flight
Director: HP Mendoza
Written by Jesse Orenshein
Cast: Grant Rosenmeyer, Paul Raci, Lucy DeVito
Not rated
Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes
On request 23 August
by Tessa Swehla, Associate Editor
Grief is a difficult subject for most people. It is so personal, so intimate and raw, and often the last thing the grieving person wants to talk about. Yet grief is one of the few experiences that is guaranteed to all people: As one character in the fantasy dramedy explains The secret art of human flight (Director: HP Mendoza): “If you want something to begin, if you want something to exist, you have to accept that it has an end.”
The grief over the loss of a partner is particularly difficult, and this type of grief is at the centre The secret art of human flight. The film opens with the funeral of Sarah Grady (Reina Hardesty), a popular children’s book illustrator and wife of Ben Grady (Grant Rosenmeyer). Ben is in a state of shock due to Sarah’s sudden death – she died of anaphylaxis as a result of an allergic reaction – and to make matters worse, the police suspect he may have been involved in his wife’s death. After seeing a clip online that appears to show a man flying, Ben follows a trail of links to the dark web and finds an enigmatic guru named Mealworm (Paul Raci), who promises that Ben, too, can learn to fly (if he pays $5,400 for the guidebook). Ben becomes obsessed with the project of learning to fly, and soon Mealworm himself shows up at Ben’s home to help him train.
The film’s most poignant observation is the loss of identity that occurs when we lose someone so close to us. Ben and Sarah were a team both personally and professionally: Ben wrote the children’s books that Sarah illustrated. They had been together since high school and worked from home together, which is a tricky experience at the best of times. Sarah is an enormous part of Ben’s identity: he no longer recognizes himself or the world around him without her. In many ways, being Sarah’s husband and business partner is a huge problem for him. Was Ben’s destiny, and now that it’s gone, he’s aimless, which is why the project of flying appeals to him so much. It gives him a goal, albeit a very unusual one.
The film cleverly reveals all of this through video footage of Sarah promoting her new books and updating her fans on the progress of her current project. One imagines that the edited versions of these videos would find their way to a Patreon or Instagram story, but we get to see the unedited versions, with Ben and Sarah’s personal and professional conflicts always just beneath the surface between shots. We also get the impression that Ben was struggling with depression before Sarah’s death, so flying also takes on a new meaning, namely “leaving the Earth behind,” as Mealworm puts it. This could represent a symbolic new beginning for Ben, or death, and for Ben, the difference between the two doesn’t seem to matter for much of the film.
The film doesn’t really get beyond this exploration of lost identity, though. Dramedy is a difficult genre because the ratio of comedy to drama (and vice versa) has to be just right or the audience will suffer emotional whiplash. The secret art of human flight suffers from this tonal dissonance: there are sequences in the film that feel like a never-ending series of comedy sketches, and other sequences are too depressingly dark to be funny, even in the bitter sense.
That’s not to say the film doesn’t have its moments: The standout in this one is actually Raci, who plays Mealworm as a goofy, crystal-bedecked, Winebago-driving internet guru who looks like he’s from Sedona. Mealworm is a ridiculous caricature, but in fairness, he seems fully committed to Ben and his own teachings. The training sequences in which he makes Ben run around his backyard, jump over broken glass, get high on mushrooms, and undergo intense phobia immersion therapy (something you should never do without a trained professional) are some of the film’s funniest and best. Unfortunately, Raci is just so good at playing a sincere crackpot that the suspense of whether he’s serious or swindling Ben falls off a little. Even when the film tries to sow doubt about his motives, it’s almost impossible to imagine him as anything other than sincere.
There is simply not much more here than “grief makes people do bizarre things to regain their sense of purpose.” Other films have done this better: Dan Levy’s Good grief (2023), for example, captures the complexity of losing a partner with nuanced humor and pain, as well as genuine love for its main characters and a coherent identity. The secret art of human flight makes some good attempts but misses the mark.
