This film was screened as part of the 21st annual Tallgrass Film Festival.
I watched the grief of Ben Grady (Grant Rosenmeyer) with a purposeful disconnect at first, much like many of the characters in H.P. Mendoza’s The Secret Art of Human Flight. His wife, Sarah (Reina Hardesty), has passed away from anaphylaxis at the unfortunate age of 31 and everyone is hopeful he’ll start moving on as soon as they’ve filed out of the wake. His sister, Gloria (Lucy DeVito), is leaving on vacation with her cop boyfriend (Nican Robinson) and the tickets are non-refundable. His psychiatrist (Steve Alexander) thinks it’s great that he feels bad. Oh, and police detective Reyes (Rosa Arredondo)? She believes he killed his wife.
H.P. Mendoza (Bitter Melon, I Am a Ghost) is a creative filmmaker who always keeps on the right side of cloying and toes it just enough to emotionally strike an audience. A horror movie, a musical, a family drama, everything is within his grasp and he keeps it grounded, personable, and always charming. His visual album Attack, Decay, Release is one of my favorite films in recent memory and this year he’s crafted yet another lovely feature. Taking on writer Jesse Orenshein’s tight-knit script, Mendoza’s latest is a captivating parable of love, life, and loss.
I don’t use the word “parable” lightly. A parable is often used to convey some sort of emotional or moral lesson with human characters, moved like pieces on a chessboard to guide the audience to a specific conclusion. Mendoza gets messier with it, working with a dreamlike series of visuals that make this story feel as real as a papercut and as otherworldly as a faded memory. Shot in 4:3, imbuing the film with a storybook sensation, crafts a picture book for adults to learn about loss. It’s fitting that this form is used as its central couple, a seemingly perfect couple of children’s book writers, are selling their own sweet creations as a passion. This parable isn’t so much a guide as it is a suggestion.
Grief leads us to do silly things to feel better (I bought 4 vinyls when my grampa died last month) and Ben Grady is no exception. He finds a TikTok post of a man jumping off a cliff over and over and, in typical modern American behavior, the bystanders choose to film it instead of intervening. The comments are standard, with many calling it a fake or pointing out supposed obvious greenscreen enhancements, but one takes ownership. There is a link posted that Ben can only search through the dark web. He comes into contact with Mealworm (Paul Raci) and begins learning…well, the secret art of human flight.
Mealworm may spout enough minimalist, Eastern philosophy to make a college freshman with a Fight Club poster blush but he’s got some points. A cleansing of house, body, and mind begins as Ben and Mealworm confront his losses, wear his grief on his sleeve, and confront his loss head-on to learn how to fly.
While films about grief are a dime a dozen it takes a special kind of team to make something so willing to run with how weird and unique that sensation is for each individual. Beginnings and endings are explored in painstaking detail as characters plan for endings and deny their existence. Some of the incredibly psychedelic imagery teems with brightness and pain, as though neurons are firing in the brain to attempt to grapple with staggering loss and meaning within. A late scene featuring Reina Hardesty is one of the most grounding, heart-pounding moments in the film that couples together the very real pain of its characters while us that grief is a ghost story.
I won’t tell you that The Secret Art of Human Flight is an easy watch. It’s a hilarious blast at points and devastating at others, an experience unique to each viewer. Mendoza’s latest is one of his most ambitious and experimental, a director stretching out and seeing what they’re truly capable of. It’s also one of his best.
WRITE DRUNK; EDIT DRUNK 
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