Musician and filmmaker H.P. Mendoza’s newest release The Secret Art of Human Flight looks like a B-movie and has an absurd premise usually seen in average-quality YouTube shorts. Known for his skill directing small-budget movies, Mendoza manages to take a film that even at its premise, teeters toward collapse and morphs it into a rousing and personal story about overcoming loss.
While it is in no way perfect, the film is so full of character that for many viewers, the failures are often able to be looked past, especially because many of these limitations are budget-imposed. More than anything, films like The Secret Art of Human Flight are what make being a film-lover so interesting and fulfilling; hidden gems like this film are few and far between, and they often get missed in the mess of weekly releases. But, take a moment and experience what secret arts have to offer.
The feeble basis
Written by American Ninja Warrior contestant and children’s book author Jesse Orenshein, The Secret Art of Human Flight follows children’s book author Ben Grady (Grant Rosenmeyer) after his wife and creative partner Sarah (Reina Hardesty) dies. Grady falls into a deep depression, not moving for multiple days and barely talking even to the people who remain in his life – there’s a great if well-loved, throughout the canon, montage of Ben sitting in the same spot as the day moves around him. His sister Gloria (Lucy DeVito) is the main person left to care for the grieving Ben.
Gloria gets – understandably – worried for her brother throughout all of this. This worry only gets worse when he becomes a suspect in his wife’s death and starts to act strangely, inspired by a super expensive purchase made on the deep web. This purchase is where the film gets its title: a book called The Secret Art of Human Flight. Inspired by a TikTok where a man jumps off a cliff and proceeds to fly into the sky, Ben pays multiple thousand dollars for this book and starts to change his life around the core tenets of the book.
When the book’s author and Ben’s flight guru Mealworm (the unfortunately entrancing Paul Raci) shows up at his door, Ben eventually becomes deeply committed to learning the act of flight. This commitment is spurred on by possibly the loveliest character in the film, Wendy (Maggie Grace), a writer friend of Grace’s who previously lost her husband. Wendy tells Ben that he has to find something to dive into, and with her tacit permission, Ben’s dreams take flight (I’m sorry, the joke was right there).
The secret art of the secret art
The film’s charm is its combination of authenticity and absolute absurdity; some moments are deeply grounded emotional moments, things that ring so entirely true to anyone who has experienced loss, or even just anyone who has lived and loved. These tempered moments are made dialectical with the kookier moments. Moments of a family sitting on the floor eating cold pizza, worried about each other, are paired with a man walking every chair in his house out to his front yard and then making a pile of them. The horrific, sad moments are made quotidian by the fantastical elements, and that makes the emotional impact even stronger and even deeper.
The Secret Art of Human Flight’s nonsensical elements make the film feel even more real. When someone you love dies, the world ceases to feel like it exists; death feels like fantasy before it becomes nonfiction. The film takes that fantasy and shows one version of it, a version where you move on with the help of a longhaired dogmatist named Mealworm who miraculously teaches you how to fly. It’s nowhere close to reality, and because of that, it rings truer than anything real ever could.
The film feels like something the ever-imitated Charlie Kaufman would write at his peak: something parallel to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Synecdoche, New York, or Being John Malkovich. For fans of this style of film, of the film where reality is set aside at the door of the movie theatre, there is nothing greater than discovering something that locks into the genuine that lies within that simulated. And more than anything else, that is The Secret Art of Human Flight.
Imperfections inherent in perfection
A film can only be considered perfect if you see its imperfections and take them as part of its glamour. Our art can only be reflective of humanity if its failures are apparent. A painting is great because, close up, we see its brushstroke, its minuscule imperfections, and only upon backing up and seeing the whole its presence, and its greatness will smash into your eyes; the film is the same way. We know something is great when we accept that its failures sometimes make it better, or perhaps make it more human. Art is nothing if not the assemblage of something in a human manner.
All of this babbling about the nature of art is to say that, no, The Secret Art of Human Flight isn’t perfect. But, neither are you nor me nor any work of art. Instead, what the film does within its failures – overly simple shots, limited cohesion, and, for some, too much quirkiness – is make something that is singular and keyed into what it means to be a human. Constrained by budget and medium (every medium has its restraints), The Secret Art of Human Flight is a perfectly human film and a film that even with its faults furthers the pursuit of understanding who we are as a species.
The Secret Art of Human Flight is available to rent or purchase on digital and on demand.
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