About halfway into Courtney Stephens’ new film Invention, a lawyer (filmmaker James Kienitz Wilkins) tells our protagonist, Carey (Callie Hernandez, co-screenwriter with Stephens), that ideas are as powerful as the products we can turn them into. It’s a cynical line, perhaps, or maybe just realistic. But it’s also an obvious assessment of the state of the world, one particularly pronounced in the rarified air of Locarno, where the film recently enjoyed its world premiere. In such a place, abounding with films absolutely full of ideas but short of traditional commercial appeal, the question of the horrors our ideas can be turned into is at once gravely important and embarrassingly superfluous.
Stephens’ and Hernandez’s film, a nimble and form-breaking story based in part on the real life and death of Hernandez’s father, is a piece of art brimming with its own ideas: about the opportunities that fantasy provides the form of a fiction film, and what it can undo when unleashed in a person’s mind. Everything about Invention points toward the subterranean, particularly the influence on things above the surface by those underneath. Its simple narrative follows Carey in the wake of her father’s death, which has left her with the tattered remains of poorly managed business ventures and a patent for a mysterious electromagnetic healing device — the film’s titular invention — said to interact with the body’s natural electronic signals to rid it of ailments. What becomes more pressing than his mismanaged business practices, however, is the legacy of paranoia embodied not only in her father’s machine, but in the lack of clarity about who her father actually was. It’s up to Carey to piece together the mysterious story of her father’s life through encounters with old friends and business partners, all while the archive, long a preoccupation in Stephens’ practice and here presented in warmly distant clips of Carey’s father’s TV appearances, traces his winding path toward paranoia.
The notion of property, both private and exclusionary, as Carey’s lawyer notes, is the point from which all manner of paranoia germinates. She learns her father, Dr. J, was fiercely protective of his invention’s purity, unwilling to sell to venture capitalists eager to make a quick buck regardless of the machine’s effectiveness; and in passing the patent for his invention to his daughter, too, expressed distrust in others. The role of grief can be slotted into this framework as well, like when Carey misses out on an airline’s bereavement discount because her travel fell outside their official two-week bereavement window. When you don’t even have ownership over your own grief, the mind becomes porous, receptive to other fictions and fantasies that explain the previously unexplainable.
Invention is a kind of paranoid noir for the neo-mumblecore set, in which the anecdotal recollection of a dead man’s history unfolds before his clueless daughter, who’s already unsure how to navigate the world in numbing, unresolved grief. Like in post-war America in the late 1940s, the world’s paranoia is brought squarely to home, slowly winding its way into the psyche of our objective protagonist. A past associate of Carey’s father, Tony (Tony Torn), quotes Emerson to remind her that “of all the ways to lose a person, death is the kindest.” It’s an ironic turn in the film, knowing how much of her father Carey had lost to his paranoia without her even realizing it.
Like all great noirs, Invention is anchored by a colorful cast of supporting players, all of whom destabilize and muddy Carey’s understanding of her father. Along with Tony, we meet a woman (Lucy Kaminsky), an ardent follower of Dr. J’s ideas and already deep into her own paranoid spiral; Henri, a venture capitalist stoner and silent meditator never too sedated to not follow up on a deal; a man (uncredited in the pre-festival screener, but bearing a striking resemblance to filmmaker Joe Swanberg) who at one point was meant to manufacture Dr. J’s invention and tries to comfort her in her repressed grief with a prayer; and an elderly employee at Tony’s antique shop, an expert clock restorer who expounds spontaneously on the conspiratorial coincidence of obelisks in city-states like Washington D.C. and the Vatican. As the paranoid woman tells her late in the film, some people are like concrete — impenetrable against the real truth of the world. Faced with her own doubts, Carey herself slowly becomes porous, and risks slipping into the same spiral her father might have.
Invention is never content to settle on one form. Within both the primary story, shot on hazy 16mm film, and the archival clips, shot on video, it deliberately calls its own creation into question — hardly a novel strategy. The question of how much of this film is the real investigation by Hernandez herself to learn more about her father is answered by periodic breaks in the illusion of the film, such as the off-screen voice of Stephens “wrapping” the character of Tony, or correcting Kienitz Wilkins’ character when he mistakenly calls Carey “Ms. Hernandez” instead of the character’s last name, Fernandez. These illusion-breaking tactics, however, present the very mechanics of filmmaking as a strategy for disillusionment, as seeds of doubt about not only what goes on underneath the shiny surfaces of our mass entertainment, but indeed underneath the surface of nearly everything on earth, including ourselves. The real fear that Invention confronts is where exactly the exploitation of the world’s unknowability can be, and already has been, taken.
Published as part of Locarno Film Festival 2024 — Dispatch 1.
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