Searching for a Heart

Rachel Elizabeth Jones reviews three new indie films about loss, grief, and absence.

By Rachel Elizabeth JonesJune 26, 2025

• Film

MARY MAGDALENE gazes at a burning flame, painted into perpetual contemplation by Georges de La Tour in the 1600s. In the festival trailer for this April’s Los Angeles Festival of Movies (LAFM), a maybe-thirtysomething man in vintage aviators stares at a red light, willing it to turn green. Magdalene cradles a human skull in her right hand; she considers life and death, herself—like everyone—bodily positioned between the two. Back in Los Angeles, the man fails to telepathically influence the stoplight; instead, he is absorbed by a dance party in the red glow, his old Volvo left abandoned at the intersection altogether. Magdalene stares at the flame indefinitely—today, one of two versions of La Tour’s The Magdalen with the Smoking Flame is at the L.A. County Museum of Art.

Partying (or texting, or putting on mascara) at a red light is one thing; doing it inside of a red light is a wholly different metaphor. Directed by Allison Bunce and played before all features, the roughly one-minute and 40-second bumper for the 2025 LAFM, in its second year, advertises the festival and its sponsors (most prominently, the aggressively growing MUBI—and shortly after writing this article, it was announced that MUBI would be “ready to rival Netflix, Amazon, and Disney” with an investment of $100 million from Sequoia Capital, drawing criticism from members of the MUBI community who object to Sequoia Capital's investor ties to Kela, an Israeli defense technology startup), tells the audience to put their phones away, and thanks volunteers—and every time it played, I felt utterly vexed by its uncanny aptness, the sheer economy with which it addressed a millennial zeitgeist of winkingly wholesome nostalgia, the yearning for a paradigm shift of metaphysical proportions, and, if you like, the pesky question of having fun during the steady rise of American techno-fascism. Is joy resistance? Why or why not? Explain your reasoning. So here we are, magically sucked into the party in the red light, watching West Coast premieres and some truly excellent restorations.

Questions of negation, of absence, abandonment, and the reanimation of the void surge paramount, specifically in three films from emergent (millennial) women directors: Courtney Stephens’s Invention (acquired in April for distribution by MUBI), Amalia Ulman’s Magic Farm (also distributed by MUBI), and Grace Glowicki’s Dead Lover (acquired by Cartuna x Dweck Productions). Like the festival trailer’s faux-vintage Joe, and despite vast differences in style and genre, each of these directors take arrested motion—through death, disillusionment, and grief—as grounds for storytelling that seeks to mystically animate vital absences.

In Stephens’s Invention, a burning flame is used to visually indicate the film’s parallel investigations of life/death and fact/fiction. Co-written by the film’s star Callie Hernandez, the story follows “Carrie Fernandez” in the aftermath of the death of her father, a figure the viewer comes to know through a gently unfolding plot studded with VHS-recorded television footage of Hernandez’s actual father, “a medical doctor turned small-time huckster,” as Filmmaker described him in their recent profile of the film. Carrie traces the space left by her father’s death, navigating the weirdness of loss and its attendant duties: the borderline silliness of choosing a crematory urn; a vain attempt to make sense of an airline’s bereavement scheduling policy; the act of telling people, over and over, that your dad is dead.

She carries out death’s dumb chores against the backdrop of cozy-eerie New England (complete with a “witch window”) and thirtysomething single womanhood. Buzzing at the center of this journey is an exquisite prototype and patent for her father’s invention, an electromagnetic healing device of dubious efficacy. Modeled after a real device that belonged to Hernandez’s actual father, this object is the one thing Carrie inherits that may be of value.

The precise distance between Carrie, Callie, and their respective fathers may be an unknown quantity, and the slack between fact and fiction is what allows for invention. The film dwells on this explicitly in close-up shots of a candle accompanied by on-set audio of Stephens and cast members, a pointed gesture of reflexivity about the relationship between memory, memorialization, and filmmaking. The film is Stephens and Hernandez’s invention for and about metabolizing grief, a father-flame lit indefinitely through media—and other types of invention, both objects and narratives, are woven throughout as well, the healing machine bearing notable resemblance to parts of a certain type of clock. (The authentic version, it would seem, is known to Americans as a four-glass clock, or a “crystal regulator.”)

“The clock is the perfect invention,” says one of Dr. Fernandez’s friends, who repairs them. Stephens’s camera lingers on clocks and their parts in various states of functionality, bringing to mind Agnès Varda’s beloved clock without hands in The Gleaners & I (2000). A brief cameo from Disney’s Cogsworth, appearing in the form of a desktop trinket, invites viewers to the precise intersection of the mechanical and magical animation of time. From Harold Lloyd’s ingenious enactment of time’s danger, elasticity, and vulnerability in Safety Last! (1923) to Christian Marclay’s exhaustive survey of clocks in movies (The Clock, 2010), timekeeping and the time-based medium of film have long been explicitly entwined. Clocks and movies are both highly technical creations that, in the sum of their intricately moving parts, provide scaffolding for the ineffable.

Beyond physical inventions and family histories, Invention addresses another form of fabrication: the conspiracy theory. Tying Carrie’s fuzzy quest to a present American political context, the film touches upon a hunger for sensemaking through its characters’ conversations about obelisks, vibrational frequencies, and shadow governments. “Babby,” a patient of Dr. Fernandez, makes no secret that she thinks the doctor was offed for his groundbreaking research. “There are these conspiracy theories many of the characters offer Carrie,” Stephens explained to Jordan Cronk for Filmmaker, “almost all of which we encountered while working on the production of the film. So, even in those spaces of ‘invention’ we are trying to document America in the present […] America is desperate for a narrative.” Emphasized by a scene in which Carrie and her friend Sahm (Sahm McGlynn) chat in a deteriorating, Alice in Wonderland–themed corn maze, the absence at hand is not just a father but also a functional through line, a blueprint for how to put together the pieces in a way that makes sense.

If Invention treads with grainy softness through layers of loss and murky modes of healing, Amalia Ulman’s Magic Farm literalizes and satirizes a contemporary American desperation for narrative loudly and in living digital color, doing so with all the subtlety of a GoPro strapped to a dog. In Ulman’s second feature film, a VICE News–esque film crew blusters around a town in rural Argentina, hoping to produce the next viral sensation of gonzo-mimicking cultural reportage, or at least not lose their jobs. The fictional crew is headed up by Chloë Sevigny and Simon Rex, a casting choice that will destabilize any viewer who might struggle to digest a timeline in which these specific actors are not only 50 years old but also playing a couple. (Notably, Sevigny also narrates the recently released documentary John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office, which Courtney Stephens co-directed.)

When the crew’s quest to track down elusive internet musician “Super Carlitos” goes awry through sheer incompetence, their solution is to enlist the townspeople to help fabricate an obscure ritual from the ground up. As with Invention, the grift becomes a primary vehicle for exploring need; a void of story becomes the story.

At face value, Magic Farm speaks to the rise and fall of a particular cultural moment, in which sexy, young city-dwelling Americans were able to capitalize—really capitalize—on new digital forms of storytelling in a sensational mash-up of pseudo-anthropology and fashion editorial. VICE was nothing if not brash, relentless, and, often, mean for the fun of it. It was also synonymous with coolness. Ulman’s American characters are none of these things, exactly—on top of being incessantly Brooklyn-coded, they are tired, anxious, whiny, and lost, qualities that are, perhaps, a frequent-enough reality behind coolness. Ulman, well known for her thoroughly contemporary examinations of gendered performativity and artifice, became famous with Excellences and Perfections, a series of 186 Instagram posts through which she invented and inhabited the persona of a rather jailbait blonde #onajourney in the big city. Not for nothing, Magic Farm addresses the very specific threats that young women faced in the VICE-o-sphere by alluding to in-house harassment allegations that contributed to the media group’s downfall. (It is maybe unsurprising that VICE has more recently received coverage for its right-wing turn.)

Ulman understands shell, and has a gift for making shiny, hard surfaces about shiny, hard surfaces. Given this penchant, Magic Farm seems uncharacteristically soft, playing like a simple story about privileged and foolish Americans abroad who maybe learn something but definitely not a whole lot. After sketching out a bankrupt vacuum, Ulman fills it with a focus on the relationships that develop between the film crew and townspeople, along with some animals. Unfortunately, these “human” moments of encounter and vulnerability feel cliché, as if Ulman herself isn’t sure what register of earnestness she wants to play in. I don’t know in what way I am supposed to believe the image of Chloë Sevigny having a sad emotional communion with a horse, exactly like I don’t know in what way I am supposed to believe Ulman when she writes that she identifies as “a loser brunette.” (Or that “being a female writer-actor-director and reading about other female writer-actor-directors is never fun.” Never?)

The film’s slipperiness might be part of the point, but the vapidity of Ulman’s Americans seems to permeate the film itself, not unlike the toxins of the environmental crisis they fail to uncover. A hollowness about hollowness, Magic Farm nihilistically outlines an oppressive individual and collective absence of meaning and depth, without really conjuring any magic of its own.

Magic Farm and Invention both deal in their own brands of realism; not so with Grace Glowicki’s Dead Lover, a raunchy, bawdy romp that opens with a Mary Shelley quote: “There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand.” Sure enough, Dead Lover invokes Frankenstein (1818) to the extent that its time frame is in the past and the story’s central character attempts to imbue body parts with life using electricity. Written by Glowicki and her partner Ben Petrie, the film is the pair’s second feature—they starred together in Tito (2019), written and directed by Glowicki. Dead Lover follows a chronically smelly gravedigger (played by Glowicki) as she seeks romance, finally finding her mate in an erudite, over-the-top poet (Petrie) who dies at sea when struck by lightning. When the gravedigger is given what’s left of her dead lover—his finger—she attempts to reanimate it by harnessing (what else?) the power of lightning. And she succeeds, sort of.

What Dead Lover has to say, it says through unabated and painfully self-aware theatrics. It looks and feels as if the theater kids grew up and made the low-budget horror-comedy of their dreams, which more or less seems to be the case. With sets staged in black box theaters, Glowicki screeches in a Cockney accent, bodies are buried and unburied, erotic rhyming poetry is recited, lesbian nuns cavort in the woods, a tree stump is used for masturbation, the plot twists and turns at about the same manic pace that many of the scenes are edited. Perhaps the film’s most poetic image comes when the lover’s long, long, long reanimated finger writes “BODY” in a steamed-up window, demanding what’s missing.

The cinematography of Dead Lover, shot on 16 mm, makes the film seem to glow, as if it’s also an inanimate object approaching sentience if only fed enough voltage. The performances feel electrically motivated by sheer self-satisfied glee, thrusting hornily towards some kind of critical mass or, I guess, climax—an obliteration of loneliness and death through raucous carnival. While Dead Lover playfully mucks about in the realm of sexual agency, fetish, and kink-positivity, it makes no real pretense of social commentary, which is just fine. (Joy might be resistance, after all.) If “elevated horror” encapsulates a sleek, knowing approach to contemporary social trauma, a film like Dead Lover might be its inverse—a scrappy, balls-out affair that tries very, very hard to claim itself as “lowbrow.” Both genres wink at you as they attempt to blow your mind, dude.

The resonances between Invention, Magic Farm, and Dead Lover are bolstered by yet another shared element: each film stars its respective makers. In both Invention and Magic Farm, co-writer Hernandez and Ulman play alternate versions of themselves; it’s unclear the extent to which Glowicki’s gravedigger persona reflects elements of her actual character, but at the very least she and her real-life partner play lovers in a story of their own devising. Acting in one’s own work is common enough in the world of independent film, and autofiction is certainly of the moment, literarily speaking. The autobiographical impulse in these films suggests a sort of collapse between diagnosis and cure—in the face of emptiness, one puts their body, their whole self, on the line, or at least into their art. Grief is a full-body experience even when it’s out-of-body and the only way out, they say, is through.

In a 2021 AMC ad, Nicole Kidman told us that we go to the movie theater “for magic.” This year, LAFM told us that we go to the movies to abandon our cars (and phones) and dance at the party in the red light. Between Invention, Magic Farm, and Dead Lover, a diagnosis brews. Things are missing: a father, a story, a lover. The truth, purpose, sex. Thematically and formally, Invention hums delicately in hushed tones, Magic Farm preens and loiters in bright internet shorthand, and Dead Lover shrieks about how crazy it is. Each embodies a hunger for reenchantment. What’s dead about and around us, and what can still come alive? How much juice are we going to need? These are films that puzzle over how to keep the candle burning, and ask if the damn light is ever going to turn green.

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Featured image: Georges de La Tour. The Magdalen with the Smoking Flame, ca. 1635–37. Gift of The Ahmanson Foundation, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (M.77.73). CC0, lacma.org. Accessed June 23, 2025. Image has been cropped.