What a beautiful movie!

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

The director portrays humans as simple and extremely mailable, assuming a TV story can change the minds of people so easily or make humans commit suicide to move on to the next existence. Lots of potential in the idea of measuring brain activity through the death experience, but story just never goes anywhere. Old ideas that memories remain in dead bio matter? Really? And cadavers still possessing brain waves of future thoughts? It appeared to be an agenda driven movie, without ever making the agenda clear. (unless reincarnation is still believed by some as an agenda.) A very sad view of humanity suggesting all of us are just waiting to move on to the next reality to try and fix the mistakes of the past.

The beautifully directed and acted movie sends out a powerful message with the implication that suicide is not the way to reach an afterlife, which is indeed an alternate reality from our own reality, where we get a second chance to correct our mistakes. A thorough exploration and masterful presentation makes the movie a masterpiece.

Lookie here: an intelligent sci-fi movie. This means usually that almost everybody in it is downtrodden and serious all the time, the atmosphere is sombre and the story makes attempts to challenge us intellectually. All these boxes have been checked in „The Discovery", too. Son (Jason Segel) accuses father (Robert Redford) for mother's suicide. Father doesn't argue, is too busy with searching the truth about afterlife. After he unveiled the proof of its existence, many have just gone and killed themselves, so further studies are in order. Also playing, Rooney Mara, Jesse Plemons, Mary Steenburgen, Riley Keough. Premiered at Sundance film festival and distributed worldwide by Netflix, „The Discovery" ain't bad but as a whole, it's not especially good either. I would place the blame on co- writer/director Charlie McDowell succeeds in generating some suspense throughout the movie but has not discovered how to make story somehow interesting also visually, and has only gotten mediocre performances out of most actors involved, especially the three leads. Jesse Plemons – unknown but with lots of TV experience – is by far the most expressive and memorable actor of the bunch here. Steenburgen, too, is good as always although she has only couple minutes of screen time. Still, it's interesting to see Segel of the Apatow bunch taking on a rare serious part. And it's always nice to meet Redford again whose better days as an actor ended with the 20th century. The screen legend is 81 already, and has lost most of his facial expressiveness by now, so his performance is suitably creepy considering his role and the dark atmosphere of the movie. Movies like this tend to receive more favorable critics' reaction when they're all indie and/or made in Spain or something (at least outside the US). Thus the score is low in both Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic: 55/100 and 45/100, respectively. The IMDb users have been reacting better, the score is 6.3/10 which seems more adequate to me. A fun fact: Mara is co-writer/director McDowell's girlfriend and Steenburgen is his mother.

Will, who is against his fathers Thomas experiments, says something along the lines of:"whatever purpose we have in this life it is not about killing."It is about compromise and working out a solution acceptable to all. We have to learn what we are supposed to learn right here, in this place, not the one after.In reality there is of course overwhelming evidence for life after death. The character Thomas is the movie version of Raymond Moody.Having myself experienced an NDE at age 7 I can tell you that the afterlife has nothing to do with being stuck in a Groundhog Day style loop of trying to rectify mistakes of your past.But it is a cute idea.