Hollywood has an unnatural fondness for secular religiosity, desperately wanting the comfort of an afterlife without any of the specificity of an actual religious teaching. This is how we get inoffensively spiritual but otherwise kind of fine films like Ghost and What Dreams May Come. I can now confidently add The Discovery to my carefully curated collection of annoyingly agnostic fables.

As high concept, low effort science fiction “How would the world react to proof of an afterlife?” is a great premise, and the film actually answers it pretty quickly: a giant uptick in suicides to get to the “other” place. I didn’t really understand that particular impulse, but it didn’t smack me in the face like the following four anger-inducing touchpoints:

We All Have Souls Trust Me Bro

The film starts off running with this first giant leap of faith, and to the filmmakers’ credit, you don’t get much time to simply dwell on the giant immutable indisputable fact that your consciousness leaves your body when you die and then goes somewhere else. I know lots of people believe this, but to say that somehow it’s been scientifically proven beyond all doubt struck me as religion handwaved as fact. I didn’t like it, but I let it go.

Jason Segel’s Decade of Acting Sadly

I watched The End of the Tour last year, and that’s on me. It’s a compelling character study of two people, one of whom is an insightful sensitive man slowly destroyed by his insights, played by one Jason Segel. I’ve also watched the cleverly written Shrinking where he plays a less insightful sensitive man slowly being destroyed by the death of his wife and his failure as a parent.

In The Discovery, Will Harbor is an uninsightful sensitive man devastated by the suicide of his mother, and the weight of his role in the aforementioned discovery of the immortal human soul. Also maybe dogs. Cats seems like a stretch though. 

There are apparently other emotionally devastated characters embodied by Mr. Segel during this stage of his career, and I hope for his sake he’s found the next stage, because I really don’t want to have to experience another sensitive devastated character with that man’s face again. I honestly don’t know how his character in The Discovery gets out of bed every morning.

Rooney Mara’s Manic Pixie Dreamgirl on Lithium

Will meets Isla on a ferry as he’s traveling to reunite with his father, then next sees her trying to drown herself next to the family mansion. I did get hung up on a lady named “island” going to an island by boat to drown herself in the main character’s back yard beach whom she’s never met before, but that’s not the real problem with Isla.

Rooney Mara by any measure is a great actor, but her character’s primary role in this film is to elicit exposition from Will by directly asking rude questions, and just generally tagging along and hanging around. All of her odd behaviors are awkwardly addressed by the film’s confusing conclusion, but it was a painful hour-plus of zero character development for what must be considered the female romantic lead in a film without romance. 

A Multiverse of Reliving Your Single Biggest Failure

One of the final reveals of the film is that upon death, a soul relives its greatest failure over and over again until some final resolution is achieved.  But the penultimate and most personally infuriating reveal is that souls aren’t merely reliving the same horrific event ad infinitum, they’re traveling through a multiverse of slightly different but remarkably similar events where they’re trying to undo the thing they did, whatever it might be.

As they were teasing then explaining this least appealing Groundhog Day remake imaginable, I kept thinking “Yes, it’s Hell. Everyone goes to Hell,” but nobody else ever considered that obvious interpretation. We’ve been beat to death with cinematic multiverses for over a decade now and I wish we could just settle on one. Maybe not this one, but any other one. 

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Each of the above pain points was a constant reminder I was watching a heavyhearted movie trying to explain itself out of the mess it made. I don’t think it succeeded.

One of the oldest imaginable questions is “where do we go when we die.” The Discovery is an attempt to not only answer that question, but at least superficially explore what would happen if we were suddenly given a definitive answer.

Once we set aside the painfully obvious truth that we are our bodies and begin to search for a more soothing and satisfying lie, all logic is lost. Oh, but the adventure begins!