“The Discovery” skims over eschatological questions

By K.S.C.

NETFLIX has an enviable commissioning record. “Orange is the New Black” has reached a seventh series, while the grimly prescient “House of Cards” has racked up 33 Emmy nominations. In 2016, Netflix spent around $5bn on 600 hours of fresh content, including “Luke Cage”, “The Crown” and the cultish and much-loved “Stranger Things”. So far, much of their success has come from television series rather than feature films. Other than the odd critical hit, such as Cary Fukunaga’s “Beasts of No Nation” and Ava DuVernay’s “13th”, most offerings have been lacklustre. Earlier this week, Quartz reported that the streaming service’s most popular original releases were a dull pair of Adam Sandler comedies. (Four more were promptly commissioned.)

“The Discovery” was perhaps intended as a high-brow counterpoint to such mulch. In a near-present world created by screenwriters Justin Lader and Charlie McDowell (who also directs), scientific proof of life after death results in an epidemic of mass suicides as people abandon their lives in order to “get there”. Two years after Dr Thomas Harbour (Robert Redford)—the scientist who made the finding—goes public, the effects of the titular discovery have been dramatic. Digital counters in public spaces, captioned with the imploring public health message “Stay in this life”, tally the casualties. People have become numb to death, the social fabric is beginning to tear, even the value of life is under assault.

The film tries to marry the seismic social shifts of the discovery with the toll it might take on individual characters. Harbour’s son Toby (Jesse Plemons) admits that he has stopped going to funerals: there are simply too many. Harbour himself, meanwhile, has become a near-recluse after a disastrous interview during which a cameraman shot himself live on air. Now he presides over a creepy facility populated by the suicidal and the bereft and rudderless individuals left behind. The film follows the relationship between Harbour’s other son, Will (Jason Segel), a troubled sceptic of his father’s discovery, and Isla (Rooney Mara), a traumatised woman he meets by chance on a ferry.

As such, “The Discovery” contains the seeds of a rounded and ambitious project. Dr Harbour’s secretive facility has pleasingly cultish overtones: he has decreed that inhabitants (Members? Believers?) wear standard-issue jumpsuits in a range of 1950s hues, attend group meetings and get expelled for breaking trivial rules. The reason for their being there is never made clear, but Harbour and some of his closest companions are continuing their research. Having established and announced the existence of a door into an afterlife, they are now, belatedly, trying to find out what lies beyond it.

Some of the characters are delightfully quirky: Isla remains dour, notwithstanding the maybe-maybe-not romance with Will. One facility inhabitant records streams of consciousness onto a Dictaphone, like a frustrated novelist, no matter how rude or personal his thoughts. There are other dark, deft touches of humour too. At one point a body is snatched and then ineptly returned. “You don’t go on holiday without looking at the brochure,” Isla remarks, deadpan, of attempts being made to determine what kind of afterlife all those committing suicide can expect to enjoy, or not. The problem is that the script skitters over the surface of too many of these ideas—the cult, the romance, the characters—like a skimming stone over a frozen pond. Viewers are never given the opportunity to pause long enough to get a closer look and become fully engaged with the film and its inhabitants.

“The Discovery” recalls, both in subject matter and palette—cool greys and icy blues without and gloomy rooms within—“Source Code” (2011) and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (2004), but lacks the dash of the former and wit and intelligence of the latter. It’s hard to care as one should about the characters. The romance, in particular, feels desultory, and if any chemistry does develop between Mr Segel and Ms Mara’s characters, then it is of a singularly chilly and invisible variety. What is left, in the end, is a tangle that would have required more space and time to be drawn out into something significant. If it had been made into a series rather than a film, things might have been different.

“The Discovery” is available worldwide on Netflix from March 31st