The conspiracy-laden film you can’t miss

Alice fell down the rabbit hole. That’s how the saying goes, at least. But Alice wasn’t pushed; she didn’t even trip. In Lewis Caroll’s original children’s novel, Alice is so fascinated by the sight of a white rabbit retrieving a pocket watch from his waistcoat that she leaps to her feet to go after it, choosing to follow the rabbit into his burrow. The funny thing about this part of the story is that, until the rabbit takes out his watch, Alice is unfazed by the sight of the hare. A rabbit in full formal attire, prattling on about his tardiness? Stranger things have happened.

But the watch, that pesky timepiece, something about it sparks Alice’s attention, so much so that it draws her into a portal to another place. This other world looks a lot like hers, but something about it is different. Everyone is acting very peculiar and things don’t make perfect sense. But no matter how unnerving that is, Alice remains fascinated. She forges forward on her quest into the unknown, desperate to understand her new reality. No use trying to fight it. Things may never go back to normal.

Something similar is happening to Carrie Fernandez at the outset of “Invention,” a staggering new film made in close collaboration between director Courtney Stephens and actor-filmmaker Callie Hernandez. (Hernandez stars in the movie as a fictionalized version of herself — hence the character’s proximity to her own name.) After the death of her father, a doctor-turned-holistic healer, Carrie follows the rabbit down a hole to a more contemporary version of Wonderland, one that looks more like Massachusetts in its bucolic autumn. Here, Cheshire cats and mad hatters have been bumped for odd shopkeepers and pot-smoking venture capitalists. Carrie seeks truth in a place where there is none, wading through the muck of conspiracy that tinged the late period of her father’s life to find something tangible to hold onto after being cast adrift.

Across just 78 minutes, Stephens and Hernandez study the point where personal grief and the collective mourning of the once-idealistic version of America overlap. Their intersection is beguiling, a knockout experiment in form that questions everything and finds few answers. A feast for the curiosity-starved brain, “Invention” is the kind of revelatory work that inspires and unnerves in equal measure, a distinctly modern masterpiece that maps the rabbit hole in a way only cinema can. 

Picking up her father’s remains from a Massachusetts funeral home, Carrie begins her journey through the mundane bureaucracy of grief. She’ll take the black, plastic box that’s issued by the crematorium; that’s fine. It’s the cheapest option for an urn, and with the mountain of small debts and promissory notes from her father’s estate that have fallen into Carrie’s lap, something simple and inexpensive would be a nice change of pace. Woven throughout this prelude and the rest of the film is footage from Hernandez’s father’s archives; spots on local Texas public access television and new-age health videos extolling the properties of vitamins or infrared-beaming glasses. In the earliest of these tapes, her father — sporting a nametag reading “John,” though he’s referred to mostly in the film as “Dr. J” — stands proudly at a seminar, where the instructor asks him to tell the crowd something he likes about himself. “I like my ability to connect with people on a one-to-one level,” he replies. 

Callie Hernandez as Carrie in “Invention” (Courtney Stephens/Mubi)As Carrie soon finds out when she begins to untangle the mystery of his estate, her father was all too good at forging these kinds of relationships. A number of his former cohorts have claims against the estate for money he owes them, mostly from a series of failed holistic healing devices he concocted over the years. The patent for one of these gadgets — a large, electromagnetic, vibrational wand — is Carrie’s only inheritance. Despite the product being recalled by the FDA, the estate’s executor (James N. Kienitz Wilkins) tries to convince Carrie of its potential value. But Carrie is less interested in the patent’s worth than what it might be able to tell her about her dad, something she doesn’t realize until she speaks to an old acquaintance of her father’s who runs an antique shop in town. The store’s owner, Tony (Tony Torn), invested and lost some money on the device. And as Tony tells her about his experience, Carrie looks over to see the shop’s repairman fixing an old grandfather clock. Now that Alice has seen her pocketwatch, all that’s left to do is follow the hare. 

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The subsequent expedition is filled with offbeat personalities who help Hernandez and Stephens construct their myth, before poking the bricks out one by one, in ways both droll and achingly sad. A woman who swears the healing device has cured her debilitating TMJ ponders whether unseen forces killed Dr. J. (“He was doing really revolutionary work,” she asserts with enough conviction to stir suspicion in both Carrie and the viewer.) The device’s manufacturer insists that he and Carrie get on their knees to say a prayer together. A backer with deep pockets posits that the device never would’ve been recalled with his powerful connections at the FDA. None of their experiences add up to one complete picture, yet they are all deeply compelling. And even more than that, Carrie just admires sitting with these people, hearing them talk. The loose ends won’t tie themselves together, but they’ll hold just long enough for Carrie to feel connected to a part of her father she couldn’t always figure out.

Everyone Carrie meets in this passage through her grief is desperate to discover something greater than themselves, a power that will stop time’s ravages forever. Everyone is aging, losing money, and feeling lost and entirely directionless in a country that has deferred its fabled dream to prioritize wealth and power. “Capitalism,” Carrie says to the antique store’s clerk, Sham (Sahm McGlynn). “Everyone’s just trying to make a buck.” Even those who are still alive are forced to spend parts of their existence inadvertently bereaving the death of a life they were promised. Is it any wonder that people want to believe some governing hand is silently controlling it all? Or, perhaps more importantly, is that really so untrue?

Stitched throughout “Invention” are audio clips recorded during the film’s production, of Hernandez and Stephens telling their actors about what’s fact and what’s fiction. “Is it true?” one asks Hernandez as she tells them about the 528 hertz sound frequency her father asked her to play while he was dying in the hospital. “That’s true,” she replies. 

Callie Hernandez as Carrie in “Invention” (Courtney Stephens/Mubi). Like conspiracy so often does, Stephens and Hernandez blur reality just enough to muddy their audience’s perception. In a feebler, curious state, falsehoods can take root while truth slips through our hands, and vice versa. But these meta moments are not a deconstruction of the form, so much as they are a mirror. As much as it indulges in fantasy, filmmaking should reflect real life, even if the art form can’t always make sense of it.

In the end, life is absurd. There is no rationalizing or interpreting to be done. Life is short, and even if it’s well-lived, its brevity is both beautiful and cruel. The spools of thread Carrie unravels eventually end. The energy dissipates. The device turns off. The rabbit hole Alice fell into spits her out of Wonderland and back into reality. 

But, oh, what fantastic beings she met along the way. All the stories she heard, the minds she peered into. Didn’t they all feel like they brought a greater truth into reach?

In a scene shot in an “Alice”-themed corn maze, a young boy tries to explain the ending of Lewis Carroll’s story to Carrie. “It never tells if this was a dream or if it actually happened,” he says to her. Hernandez herself is just as coy, slipping in enough truth to snare the viewer and keep them mesmerized against a chilly, bare synth score. Even if it was a dream, it felt so real. Now, shaken from a reverie, reality collides with illusion at the languid pace of a stream. In Rafael Palacio Illingworth’s remarkable cinematography, the fabric of one image burns into another. A shot of a book titled “The Healing Messages of Water” lingers long enough for us to read that it was also a New York Times bestseller. We buy into the fantasy because it gives us a little bit of hope, no matter how fleeting. But even if the hope goes, that microscopic inkling — the one that convinces us even fiction might have some truth to it — lingers. It’s what keeps us moving through life, talking to strangers, searching for someone whose energy meets ours so we can connect on a one-to-one level.

“Invention” streams on MUBI July 4, and can be seen this summer at Vancouver Cinematheque, New York’s Anthology Film Archive and Toronto’s Hot Docs Ted Rogers Theater.