The Secret Art of Human Flight
Directed by H.P. Mendoza
Written by Jesse Orenshein
Starring: Grant Rosenmeyer, Paul Raci, Lucy DeVito
Unrated
Runtime: 1 hour 47 minutes
On demand August 23

by Tessa Swehla, Associate Editor

Grief is a difficult topic for most people to discuss. It’s so personal, so intimate and raw, and often the last thing that the person experiencing the grief wants to talk about. Yet grief is one of the few experiences guaranteed to all human beings: as a character explains in the fantasy dramedy The Secret Art of Human Flight (dir. H.P. Mendoza), “If you want something to start, if you want something to exist, you have to be ok with it having an ending.”

The grief that comes from the loss of a partner is especially difficult, and that is the kind of grief that is at the center of The Secret Art of Human Flight. The film opens at the funeral of Sarah Grady (Reina Hardesty), a beloved children’s book illustrator and wife to Ben Grady (Grant Rosenmeyer). Ben exists in a state of shock due to the sudden nature of Sarah’s death–she died of anaphylaxis due to an allergic reaction–and to make matters worse, the police suspect that he may have been involved in his wife’s death. After seeing a clip online that appears to depict a flying man, Ben follows a rabbit trail of links into the darknet and finds an enigmatic guru named Mealworm (Paul Raci) who promises that Ben too can learn to fly (if he pays $5,400 for the guidebook). Ben becomes obsessed with the project of learning to fly, and soon Mealworm himself shows up at Ben’s house to help him train.

The most poignant observation of the film is the loss of identity that occurs when we lose a human being who was so close to us. Ben and Sarah were a team both personally and professionally: Ben wrote the children’s books that Sarah illustrated. They had been together since high school, and they worked from home together, which is an entangling experience at the best of times. Sarah is an enormous part of Ben’s identity: he no longer recognizes himself or the world around him without her. In many ways, being Sarah’s husband and business partner was Ben’s purpose, and now that she is gone, he is adrift, which is why the project of flying appeals so much to him. It gives him a goal, albeit a very unusual one.

The film cleverly reveals all of this through video footage of Sarah promoting their new books and updating their fans on their current project’s progress. One can imagine that the edited versions of these videos would make their way to a Patreon or an Instagram story, but we get to see the unedited versions, with Ben and Sarah’s personal and professional conflicts always just beneath the surface between takes. We also get the impression that Ben struggled with depression before Sarah’s death, so the flying also takes on a new significance of “leaving the earth behind,” as Mealworm calls it. This could mean a symbolic new beginning for Ben or it could mean death, and for Ben, for much of the film, the difference between the two doesn’t seem to matter.

However, the film doesn’t really progress beyond this exploration of lost identity. Dramedy is a difficult genre to master because the ratio of comedy to drama (and vice versa) has to be just right or else the audience gets emotional whiplash. The Secret Art of Human Flight suffers from this tonal dissonance: there are sequences of the film that feel like a continuous series of comedy sketches and other sequences that feel too depressingly bleak to be funny, even in a bitter way.

That isn’t to say that the film doesn’t have its moments: the stand-out in this film is actually Raci, who plays Mealworm as a goofy Sedona-looking internet guru decked out in crystals and driving a Winebago. Mealworm is a ridiculous caricature, but in fairness, he seems to be completely invested in Ben and in his own teachings. The training sequences where he makes Ben run around his backyard, jump over broken glass, get stoned on mushrooms, and do intense phobia immersion therapy (something that should never be done without a trained professional) are some of the funniest and best of the film. Unfortunately, Raci is just so good at playing a sincere weirdo that the tension of whether he is for real or if he is conning Ben falls a bit flat. Even when the film tries to insert some doubt about his motives, it is nearly impossible to imagine him as anything other than genuine.

There just isn’t a lot here more than “grief makes people do bizarre things in order to regain their sense of meaning.” Other movies have accomplished this better: Dan Levy’s Good Grief (2023), for instance, captures the complexities of partner loss with nuanced humor and pain as well as real love for its central characters and a coherent identity. The Secret Art of Human Flight makes some good attempts but misses the mark.