Video: Netflix’s The Discovery comes from the writer-director behind The One I Love, Charlie McDowell. And if this trailer is any indication, The Discovery is going to be just as weird and messed up as that film.
Image: Gif from The Discovery, Netflix
Nothing about this trailer tells you anything about the story of The Discovery. It’s mainly atmospheric, and every single frame is messed up in some way. At first it all looks like some sort of twee indie romance between Jason Segel and Rooney Mara, but then the soundtrack, Roy Orbison’s “Only the Lonely”, gets all distorted. And then Mara gets out of water not wet; there’s a bunch of people in jumpsuits that look like they’re in a cult, a weird old video with a woman and Segel and Mara manhandling a corpse; and the only spoken words in the whole thing (courtesy of Segel) are, “People are just going to keep killing themselves.”
In case you were wondering, The Discovery is about Robert Redford, a scientist who has proven the existence of the afterlife. The movie takes place a few years after his discovery has been made public and people are committing suicide in large numbers, now that they know that there’s existence after death. Segel plays Redford’s son, Will, and Mara plays the woman he falls in love with, Ilsa.
The Discovery comes to Netflix on March 31.