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Everyone deals with grief in different ways. Some people cut themselves off from the outside world and taking time to mourn alone, while others throw themselves into their work. But in The Secret Art of Human Flight, a grieving widower decides to work through his grief by learning to fly.
The Secret Art of Human Flight finds children’s author Ben Grady (Grant Rosenmeyer) struggling with the sudden loss of his wife, Sarah (Reina Hardesty). In his grief, he sees a video about a man who’s learned to fly as a way to escape the world—and he searches the dark web to track down this eccentric guru, Mealworm (Paul Raci), and order his self-help book. Ben begins following the book’s outrageous guidelines—but his behavior gets even stranger when Mealworm himself shows up in his Winnebago to help with Ben’s training.
Though Ben tries to work through his grief in the normal ways—things like talking about his feelings with a therapist or even just sitting down at his desk to start working on his next book—nothing works quite like Mealworm’s training program does. While his strange new behavior worries his sister and brother-in-law—not to mention his neighbors, who sometimes wake to find him sleeping on his roof—and it makes the police suspicious, Ben is determined to keep going.
Ben’s adventures are definitely wacky—and the only one who doesn’t question him is Sarah’s friend Wendy (Maggie Grace), who also lost her husband and who understands his need to find something and follow it through, no matter how ridiculous it may seem to everyone around him. But in spite of the absurdity of it all—and the craziness of Ben’s training exercises with his RV-driving guru—his story is also completely heartfelt. It’s silly but sincere—a lovably outlandish take on grief and healing. And the home movie feel of the filmmaking only adds to the intimacy of it. As the story plays out, it just gets stranger and stranger—and it comes to a pretty bizarre conclusion—but, somehow, it ends exactly the way it should.
The Secret Art of Human Flight is definitely a quirky dramedy. But while you’re laughing at Ben as he hangs clouds in his living room or spends a week making nothing but bird sounds, you’ll also fall in love with this grieving widower and hope that he finds his way in the end.
Fly in to see The Secret Art of Human Flight when it arrives in select theaters on July 5, 2024.
Listen to the review on Reel Discovery:
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