Co-written by director Courtney Stephens and star Callie Hernandez and derived from real archives of Hernandez’s father – is less a portrait of our contemporary milieu than it is a timeless rendering of loss. Constantly oscillating between documentary and autofiction (Hernandez plays a version of herself named Carrie Fernandez), Stephens’ film positions itself within a distinct metaphysical style of cinema, wherein the notions of self and the pictorial image are questioned altogether.
Clocking in at only 72 minutes, Invention is transient but incredibly dense in its probing of grief and attempts to understand the deceased. The first frame insinuates a recent death, with Fernandez collecting her father’s ashes from a funeral home. She soon learns that his estate deteriorated in his final years due to negligent investments, causing her only inheritance to consist of a patent for a barrel-shaped, vibrational healing machine. In an effort to expel the past whilst making sense of it, Carrie attempts to sell her father’s home. It is there that she begins a tangential string of run-ins with former associates, friends, and patients of her father, all giving her fragmented glimpses into his essence. A marred collection of remembrances, these encounters begin to formulate the identity of her father, whom she and others refer to as “Doctor J”.
Hernandez treks through its loose narrative with a wonderfully aloof performance, breathing life into moments of anguish and unexpected comedy. The latter flourishes in a humorous scene in which a manufacturer asks her to kneel to the floor in prayer – her wonderfully deadpan reaction to his insistence is an exemplar of the film’s brand of comedy. Fernandez’s attempts at understanding her father, and the intriguing healing machine he left for her is largely useless. Yet the disillusionment that she so evidently feels is akin to that of the audience, who similarly cannot arrive at any clear notion of her father. Whether intentional or not, this remove only amplifies the emotional effect of the film’s narrative, mirroring the act of attending a wake. The essence of a person feels distant regardless of the closeness of their physical remains.
However, Invention isn’t so much about its namesake as it is about reinvention: the malleable act of finding a new way of living in the world after loss. The nodes of conspiracy interwoven throughout the film suggest an allegory for a search of the soul. A number of conversations focus on the possibility that Doctor J may have been “offed” because of his advancements in holistic medicine. The theory goes unrealised, although we get the impression that Fernandez is seeking both her father’s and her own identity. By muddying the barrier between self and character, and layering the two identities upon one another, Hernandez showcases an admirable sense of self-reflexivity, proving the contention that art is a form of healing and sustenance for the lost and emotionally distressed.
In tandem, Stephens and Hernandez forgo the declamatory portrait of suffering and replace it with a placid disclosure of familial ennui, stripping the filmic desolation of all its melodrama. Abbas Kiarostami’s docufiction Close-Up (1990) comes to mind – but Stephens separates herself from other auteurs of the subgenre in her unwillingness to compromise or over-explain. That is, her film possesses a seemingly inherent inability to distinguish reality from artifice, or rather, neatly communicate this distinction. In its rejection of modernist cinematic orthodoxy, Invention forces the audience to grapple with the grainy images scattered in front of them, and question whether these images are resurrections of the deceased or mere ruminations on grief itself. These questions are never answered concretely, and the film ends with a reminder that our grief and suffering – not unlike Carrie’s – refuse to conclude themselves.
Invention is available to watch on Mubi in various geographies.
