3+1 Short Paragraphs: The Discovery

2017, Charlie McDowell (The One I Love) -- Netflix

I have a next door neighbour whom I noticed about 10 years ago. The first handful of times I saw her, I nodded a smile of recognition and hello. But soon after I realized, I had no idea from where I knew her. To this day, I have never figured out how I knew her, but am still convinced I must have -- she could have been the server at a bar I frequented when I arrived in Toronto, she could have worked with me briefly at The Store. Or, she could be from another, a past life?  And no, I have never done something as simple as ask her -- what do I look like, the creepy next door neighbour? Don't answer that.

The premise of The Discovery is that Robert Redford discovers indisputable truth of the Afterlife. They don't say exactly how, but it involves machinery and brainwaves. Despite us being in a world that disputes vaccines and how social distancing can save lives, the world accepts his science and the ramifications are not pretty. People around the world are committing suicide in droves, hoping to get a better start in the next. Will (Jason Segel, How I Met Your Mother) is Will, his son, who helped him with the Discovery, but has become estranged from his father after seeing the consequences, and from lingering bitterness against his father for his mother's suicide. The movie begins with Will on a ferry heading to a small island, to ask him once again to stop the science, tell people he was wrong. On the way to that island, Will meets Isla (Rooney Mara, The Social Network).

This is a melancholy movie about the point of life. Will believes that you shouldn't be moving on to another life if you haven't made the best of this one. It's not about Heaven or Hell, as religion plays very little into this movie, but about mistakes and learning from them. He sees people just repeating the same mistakes over and over in life, so he questions how it could be any different just moving on to another "plane of existence" and expecting anything else. That is, until he sees the results of his father's latest experiment, where he records what people see after they pass over. This new and terrible reality is that people do make different choices, do get to choose the better paths -- that you can just re-start and expect a different outcome.

**spoilers**

The weird thing is that the movie presents us with this horrible idea of not being bothered by consequences, because you can just go on and try again, and suddenly slides past it into a rather beautiful idea of the Afterlife. Will, after suffering a great loss, takes upon himself to use the machine, the machine that even his father now believes must be destroyed, to find out whether he could save Isla from a tragedy. And he passes before he learns. But in doing so, he is back on the ferry to the island, and he is back meeting Isla for the first time yet with an inkling that he knew her, but now things are being explained to him --- that Death, as a natural part of Life does allow you to try again and again and again, getting multiple chances in multiple realities, until you get it Just Right. In showing us this beauty, I had hoped it would show the folly of choosing the quick path, of ending your life early so as to have another chance, was wrong -- that it would have unforeseen consequences. Alas, no, Will has died (and technically at his own hands) but has another chance to make his life with Isla come out for the better. So, what are we supposed to learn? Nothing, I guess, just life I will never know who the neighbour really is.