Critic Reviews

You need to be strapped in and focused for director and co-writer Charlie McDowell’s ambitious, unnerving, slightly loopy and beautifully ambivalent gem, which only tackles the question: How would people react if there was absolute proof of an afterlife?

By concurrently threading the needle of both the hereafter and emotional breakthroughs for our characters, it can make the plot schematics feel too tidy in their construction, but the journey in finding how these elements fit together is never less than engrossing.

By turns resoundingly human and regretfully half-baked, the film wears its influences on its sleeve.

At the very least, its central mystery keeps you guessing, right up until a final turn that’s nearly as clever as it is convoluted.

That world is so well-realized that the film is worth seeing, but it’s a mild letdown given the number of philosophical queries that it raises, only to leave ultimately unexplored.

Unfortunately, after its fine start, this brainy slice of provocative speculative fiction slowly but surely loosens its grip on audience involvement rather than increasing it.

While the movie overdoes the plot twists and existential musings, The Discovery is a diverting head-trip whose reach far exceeds its grasp.

Though The Discovery starts out with a great premise, its mystery dissipates over a somewhat tepid course as the concept ultimately heads in a direction we’ve seen many times before, and depends overmuch on chemistry that fails to materialize between stars Jason Segel and Rooney Mara.

The story stays intriguing for much of the way, but eventually things cease to make sense.

While the film is ambitious, with enough intrigue and uneasy moral quandaries to keep my attention rapt in the end it just doesn’t make the leap to the other side.