H.P. Mendoza’s The Secret Art of Human Flight

Obviously, you should steer well clear of any New Age tract hawked on the dark web. Unfortunately, Ben Grady is not in a proper state of mind, for understandable reasons. Devastated by the loss of his wife and resenting the investigating detective’s intrusive suspicions, Grady needs something to get him out of his own head. He finds a strange guru who claims he can teach the widower to fly, not as a pilot, but like Superman, in H.P. Mendoza’s The Secret Art of Human Flight, which just released on VOD.

Ben and Sarah Grady worked together self-publishing children’s books, but she was considered the talented one. Det. Reyes only sees her $750K life insurance policy, but his sister Gloria worries her brother is spiraling into a deep depression.

Following a random social media comment to the dark web, Grady ill-advisedly buys a truly self-published—as in handwritten—tome purportedly explaining how humans can fly. It also comes with benefit of the hippy dippy guru’s personal coaching sessions. Initially, Grady is still sufficiently grounded to be suspicious of “Mealworm,” but his bizarre training regime starts satisfying something inside him.

Weirdly, it also sort of fits the advice offered by Wendy, a widow herself and the only member of Sarah’s writing’s circle who keeps checking in. She says find something crazy and stick to it. His flying ambitions certainly qualify.

This film probably would have been a disaster in any hands other than that of Mendoza. As a filmmaker, he has a record of versatility, having helmed the musical Fruit Fly and the disturbingly surreal horror film, I Am a Ghost. He also has a talent for handling heightened emotional content with a deft touch, which serves Human Flight well.

In fact, it was rather required, because Jesse Orenshein’s screenplay has considerable emotional and eccentric excesses. There are times when it tries to be either too whimsical or too sentimental, but Mendoza always brings it back to the emotional center. Indeed, the relationships between the Gradys and the widow and the widower are incredibly resonant—and ultimately much more interesting than whether or not Mealworm will get his padawan airborne.

Grant Rosenmeyer shows tremendous range as Ben Grady, but Maggie Grace and Reina Hardesty really lower the boom as Wendy and Sarah Grady (seen several times in videos recorded before her death). In fact, this is some of Grace’s best film work in the last several years. On the other hand, Paul Raci’s creepy shtick as mealworm gets to be too much, too often.

The film is uneven and at least fifteen minutes longer than it should have been. However, when Mendoza and company get serious addressing significant themes like grief and recovery, the film really starts getting somewhere. If such subject matter specifically speaks to you than The Secret Art of Human Flight will probably be worth streaming when it reaches ad-supported platforms, following its recent VOD release.