The Secret Art Of Human Flight

Ben (Grant Rosenmeyer) is depressed. This is understandable. He used to be part of the team known as Sarah and Ben, famous for the Sarah and Ben books, but now there is no more Sarah and he seems to have no more purpose. What’s more, because she died of anaphylaxis, and has a sizeable insurance policy, there’s an ongoing police investigation in which he is a suspect, making it really hard for him to get any space. So he stays in bed, until his sister Gloria (Lucy DeVito) forces him out of it, still in his blanket, into a chair in the garden; and then he stays in his chair in the garden for three days. This, it is made clear to him, is not healthy. He needs to find something – anything – on which to focus so that he can reconnect with the world.

Of course, when he does find something, Gloria is anything but happy.

It begins with a YouTube video. A man jumps off a cliff but, rather than plummeting to his death, appears to soar back up wards into the sky. There are lots of comments mocking this, saying that it’s not even good CGI – but, somehow, it gets under Ben’s skin. He’s in the perfect state to be receptive to new ideas – a perfectly vulnerable state, one might say. in asking him to live without Sarah, people seem to be demanding the impossible. Is it so much more unreasonable to believe that a man might learn how to fly? Tracking down the man in the video on the dark web, he orders his book – shockingly priced though it may be – and begins to follow its instructions, practicing by making repeated attempts to increase the distance he can jump in the garden.

As is the way of these things, Ben’s new obsession grows, and when the guru behind the book – an old hippy calling himself Mealworm (Paul Raci) turns up on his doorstep, the situation quickly escalates. Gloria and her police officer partner Tom (Nican Robinson) become seriously worried. It has to be a scam, right? What, perhaps, they don’t understand is that even if it is a scam, it has the potential to do things for Ben that nothing else can.

There’s a deep understanding of the ways that people can be affected by grief underlying the gentle, quirky comedy of this tale. Ben’s sincerity, even in the most ridiculous of circumstances, makes him an endearing protagonist. Over time, it becomes apparent that some of his issues predate Sarah’s death. There is a greater sense of insecurity that he needs to overcome. Mealworm, meanwhile, has secret struggles of his own, and despite the control that he exercises over his eager disciple, there are times when he seems to glimpse some potential there that awes him.

Despite the several structural difficulties presented by a story like this, which could easily sag or lose its momentum altogether, director HP Mendoza manages to keep it pacey and give it a sense of purpose. There are moments of real tension, and always, behind the warmth of the characters, that lurking void of depression into which Ben might easily fall once more. Furthermore, despite his seemingly limited options, Mendoza manages to pull off an ending with sudden and startling emotional power. This is a film that reminds us that miracles do happen, every day – we achieve things we didn’t think we could, and we find our way through seemingly impossible circumstances. Sometimes we just have to be willing to entertain the sublimely ridiculous.