Immortality Review

ign.com:

It would appear that the recent decision by Warner Bros. to scrap the release of its near-completed Batgirl movie was motivated entirely by boring old tax reasons, but what if there was something far more sinister at play? Such is the setup for Immortality, the latest investigative thriller from the makers of Her Story and Telling Lies, which had me scouring through an archive of FMV footage from three unreleased films in an attempt to discover exactly why they never saw the light of day. In spite of some surprisingly shallow search tools what followed was a thoroughly absorbing undertaking that began as a sort of jigsaw puzzle but morphed into the motion picture equivalent of a Magic Eye poster, and I sat completely transfixed as each piece fell into place until suddenly Immortality’s true subject snapped into focus and its shocking bigger picture was revealed.

Connecting the three unreleased films is Marissa Marcel (played by Manon Gage), a model turned actress who starred in each of the doomed productions and subsequently never worked again. She’s introduced in the opening clip of Immortality by way of a 1969 guest spot on a Johnny Carson-style talk show, charismatic and full of optimism for her upcoming big screen debut, but from there her ill-fated career is experienced as a jumble of out-of-sequence on-set takes, table reads, rehearsals, and 8mm home movies that span a 30-year period of time. Gage gives an absolutely electric performance in the main role and I couldn’t take my eyes off her, quite literally so since I had to scrutinise close to 200 clips of her by the time Immortality’s roughly nine-hour story had reached its end.

The footage itself is utterly believable, not only due to the era-specific film stocks