The Secret of Karma (2020)
Turns out the secret...was the friends we made along the way
157 ratings on IMDb. “Fewer than 50 ratings” on Rotten Tomatoes (0 reviews from critics). I was the 106th person to log this on Letterboxd. These are numbers we like to see over here at Bleeding Eye Cinema. And Brendan Fraser’s on the poster! With numbers like these, this must be the biggest diamond dug out of the widest cultural rough!
This is The Secret of Karma. And no, the film is no diamond. It’s more of a JoAnn’s Fabrics packet of plastic rhinestones (Review from Google user Foxc: “Not sparkly at all. These looked great in the bag but most colors turned milky when I use e6000 glue.” Well said, Foxc. A great review of The Secret of Karma…I mean, “hildie & jo” brand 5mm flatback rhinestones. Here’s hoping your next crafting venture doesn’t turn milky. You deserve it.)
The Secret of Karma begins with an explanation for what exactly this “secret” entails. It is the key to living your best life and getting everything you’ve ever wanted. This opening voiceover also overtly states the premise of the film we are about to watch: a man dies only to find himself coming back to life (“Really,” the voiceover states, as if we would be in disbelief that such a thing could happen in this fictional film). The man recalls his experience on the other side, where he was able to see his entire existence outside of time. And this experience unlocks the key to controlling his life.
The voiceover concludes this summary with the woman saying, almost smug in tone, “Confused?” My answer is a pretty solid “not really,” especially considering the film should explicate this further by, you know, being a movie with a plot, a visual track, and an audio track. At least in this opening scene we are reassured that, if all the usual tenets of visual storytelling fail us, the voiceover is here to guide us.
And if you are curious as to what we are seeing while this belabored, lengthy monologue of a voiceover drones on about controlling one’s destiny, it is all generic shots of space:
In Prague, a writer is struggling. He strongly believes in karma, but he also believes that karma is “holding him back.” The voiceover narrator, again quite smugly, throws the writer’s philosophy out the window before we properly meet him by saying that this idea of “karmic debt” can’t possibly be real when we create our own destinies.
The writer is in the middle of a science fiction novel that is so immediately dense with nonsense lore that I won’t bother even attempting to summarize it. But Brendan Fraser is there, inside the muddy-brown visualization of this futuristic world, as Animus, a “builder of a higher level” (whatever that means).
What is more important than the story within the story (to me, anyway) is the writer’s voice, which is hilariously over-dubbed by a different actor in such a way that the words don’t quite line up to the movements of the mouth. And the voice actor has this deep, stiff voice that also doesn’t quite fit with the character’s shlubby vibe. Frankly, the voice actor sounds like a commercial voiceover artist.
And it isn’t just him. Most of the actors are dubbed over in post, to the point where I had to look into why this may have been the case. The film is made by Czech émigré Milan Friedrich (whose website proclaims him to be “the true embodiment of the phrase ‘live your American dream’”), and it is a Czech co-production. So I thought perhaps these are Czech actors who do not speak English, and Friedrich dubbed this after the fact, Italian grindhouse style.
But reading the actor’s lips, they appear to be speaking the English-language lines. One actor, Petra Buckova, who is credited only as “Nurse,” has an IMDb bio that claims she has mastery over several languages, including English. Yet she’s dubbed over here.
None of the voice acting is particularly strong, and it makes most conversations feel stilted and alien. Occasionally, it yields some funny line deliveries (a bartender responds to a woman not wanting a drink as “boring!” That’s a highlight. A very lackadaisical “call an ambulance” is also pretty good). Regardless, I had more fun deciphering what all of this voiceover stuff was all about than I did actually watching these characters do anything.
Our writer goes into cardiac arrest, and as he lies on the operating table, he flashes back to a past he didn’t live (where the character in his book is living his unlived life…or rather, lives).
The loose threads connecting the various flashes of this character throughout time barely hang together. Frequently, the scenes feel not only disjointed but effectively meaningless to the plot, save for serving as a way of making the film feel like an epic fantasy yarn moving freely through time and space.
The author is escorted to a mysterious “Manager” (extremely slowly and over multiple monotonous dialogue scenes that somehow always end in the man drinking alcohol). This mysterious figure is “the manager of the stage called the world,” which, if you didn’t get the crazy obvious hint, the next line of dialogue confirms that the “Manager” is “God.”
The film appears to be trying to make the case that “the secret of karma” is coming to understand that karma doesn’t actually exist. The insanely superficial result of these verbose meditations (most of them dictated to us by the omniscient narrator, who makes it all seem slightly more interesting than it is) is that we are our own karma. Only you control your destiny. The only other controlling force in life is the one inverse to the force you exert: action, reaction; cause, effect. This basic theme is reiterated endlessly within a multi-temporal plot that apes liberally from Cloud Atlas.
When this message is stated explicitly, without the strange dialogue that is trying to make it seem more complicated than it actually is, it does not just come off as superficial but, frankly, naïve. Friedrich describes the film’s relationship to the concept of karma thusly:
The movie expands the idea of karma to a whole new level, to a level where we create our own reality, and showing that everything you believe in is going to happen. [sic] Happy life could furthermore come from positive thinking, gratitude, giving out, loving your life and practicing meditation.
Living your life with the earnest belief that “everything you believe in is going to happen” is not a healthy or feasible way to exist day-to-day. I can believe that I am going to win the lottery, but me believing it hard enough is not going to make it happen. That’s not what karma is about. Karma has little do with “creating reality” in the sense of attaining everything you could possibly want, and this film has little else to say about karma other than that.
Positive thinking, gratitude, and “giving out” are aspects of living that could be related back to karma, but the idea that this allows you to “have everything that you want” is antithetical to the practice of karma. It’s all just such a nothing-burger of a philosophy that it should come as no surprise that it translates to borderline nonsense on screen. The film’s last line on the matter is that “there is no karma, only the law of attraction.” And this makes so little sense it’s comical, as the two concepts are only tangentially related to one another.
I’ll let Deepak Chopra explain it (if you’re into that sort of thing):
We don’t enter this life as a blank slate, we come in with our own particular history and past tendencies, and that circumscribes what we are likely to manifest, regardless of how fervently we practice the laws of attraction. For instance, if you are a short, stocky 40-year-old who wants to play power forward for the Golden State Warriors, it’s not going to happen [editorial note: Sorry, bud!], no matter how positive your thoughts are. The present karma in place that is playing out makes this possibility an impractical use of your attention.
“Impractical” is the nice way to put it, I suppose. Another way to say it would be, in the words of Mark Manson, that it is “staggering bullshit.” The “it” being, specifically, the concept of “law of attraction” as described by Rhonda Byrne in the smash-hit self-help book The Secret (2006). (And as embarrassing as it is to admit, it is only now as I write this that I understand the absurdly bad pun at the center of the film’s title…the “secret” to karma is The Secret). The Secret of Karma effectively literalizes what Manson describes as the “I’m the center of the universe” narcissism of Byrne’s book by making its writer protagonist a literal cosmic traveler existing in potentially all times and spaces (and this omnipresence eventually allows him to manifest the life he always wanted…and cheat death).
While the recognizable actors on the film’s poster are not the leads, I was surprised at just how much of this Brendan Fraser was in. He plays multiple characters, and thus he appears in various setups with different costumes (this means multiple days, if not multiple weeks, on set). That’s more than we can say of something like…Once Upon a Time in Hollyweird. Compared to that film’s poster, Fraser being front and center on the poster and in the trailer is hardly false advertising. This was also filmed before Fraser’s renaissance, so it maybe should not be so surprising that he’s slumming it here. (He’s completely fine in the film, by the way. Compared to the over-dubbed acting that he is surrounded by, he comes off all the better).
He can’t salvage this thing at all, though. The whole thing is over-indulgent in its grand scale without a grand-scale budget (Friedrich’s website basically gloats about how the film went way over its initial $200,000 budget to an $8 million one – “astronomical” is used as a compliment). Bad green screen and CGI effects attempt to expand this epic into space, while small sets and cheap costumes attempt to pull it into the past. All the while, a script going for pseudo-intellectual falls somewhere closer to incoherent rambling.
At least I can say this one positive thing about my experience with The Secret of Karma: It gave me this little gem of a plot synopsis, courtesy of IMDb (and almost certainly sourced from Friedrich himself, as a similar plot description appears on his website):
“Real story about man who clinically died two times and become homeless while trying to film his experience. Movie saved by Aliens influence.”
Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, does it? Well, neither does the extended description from Friedrich’s website, which claims that the making of the film resulted in Friedrich meeting “former UN agents, and after their cooperation [Friedrich] became part of a galactic program which allowed him to present the concept of karma in the film from the perspective of other civilizations.” The meaning of this sentence is either lost in translation, or Friedrich is claiming to have underwent “galactic” travel and learned of other civilizations. (Also, apparently Friedrich was working on “assembling a flying saucer” prior to embarking on a career in film).
What the actual fuck is happening here? Is Milan Friedrich’s entire persona an elaborate bit? Maybe he is just an expert in branding and self-promotion, as his other film, Alpha Code is based on “the unbelievable true story” of this “galactic program.” His website proclaims: “Get free documentary on the meeting with the aliens.”
Tempting. This ludicrous alien stuff may have to wait until a future article…
…But this Stonehenge clip from Friedrich’s YouTube channel can’t wait. It’s entirely unrelated, but here you go:
The video’s description reads:
I wrote a book with the full instruction not only how to build Stonehenge which is functioning there is much more to change your life for better
Calling The Secret of Karma “inspired” by a true story at all is already a fairly bold claim (a claim repeated at the beginning and end of the film). Not to mention that the film’s story may have been written by Dalibor Stach, an actor and co-director on the film (who is also credited for multiple other roles on the production, including production design and costume design). Stach is not a credited writer on The Secret of Karma, but he wrote a book on the subject which is the ostensible “true event” that the film is based on. Behind the Curtain of Night, this book, describes how Stach died twice and was revived. Stach also wrote a screenplay based on these experiences, but, again, he is not a credited writer on Karma. Instead, he is credited as writing a different version of the same film, called Behind the Curtain of Night. This cut of the film was finished in 2023 and, from what I can tell on Stach’s social media, had a number of screenings (it is currently not available at all in the U.S.).
Quick tangent: Stach (or Stach’s translator, it is unclear) claims in an interview on The Brendan Fraser Podcast that Fraser also died twice, which created a more intimate relationship between the filmmaker and actor. There is plenty of reporting and interviews with Fraser about how filming The Mummy nearly killed him, so I suppose this is what they are talking about(?)
Anyway, to the point of all this Stach stuff…and the other shoe dropping. Essentially, Stach claims in this podcast that “a producer” (Friedrich, presumably) “stole the film” from him and released it under the title of The Secret of Karma. This cut only utilizes about 60% of the footage of Behind the Curtain of Night, Stach’s film.
This accusation is potentially revealing if we return to Friedrich’s explanation of the film. The “true event,” as Friedrich’s website explains it, happened to “A person who had lost everything in life [and cast] himself and members of his family [in the film], and created costumes and make-up exactly according to his vivid memories from his second clinical death.” Stach is never named, but all signs point to this “person” being him.
Instead of crediting Stach in this synopsis, Friedrich implies that the film has more to do with his own life than anyone else’s (you know, with all that UN agent, galactic civilization stuff). The dispute between Stach and Friedrich was resolved, apparently, so legally this is all above board. But it’s just one more wrinkle that adds to the odd case of The Secret of Karma. The figures behind the camera are far more compelling to me than any of what we get on-screen.
At Bleeding Eye Cinema, we don’t rate movies based on their artistic merits. We rate them based on strangeness, on a scale from Colin Hanks1 to full-on, run-to-the-eyewash-station Eye Bleeder.
The Secret of Karma rates as: Grape Jelly Smearer (2/5)
Milan Friedrich, the person, rates as: Gray Matter Peeler (4/5)
Colin Hanks is the true cinematic touchstone of milquetoast normieness – no offense, Colin.