By John Corrado

In her debut feature documentary Seeking Mavis Beacon, director Jazmin Jones tries to find the elusive model that became the face of the ubiquitous computer program Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing.

If you are of a certain age, the educational game is likely responsible for teaching you computer skills. Though Mavis Beacon herself is a fictitious character, she was portrayed on the program’s packaging through the likeness of Haitian model Renée L’Espérance, who has seemingly disappeared without a trace.

The search for the real “Mavis Beacon” is a theoretically interesting one (especially as someone who remembers playing it). But Jones too often buries it in a meta hangout movie about her and a prodigious young coder named Olivia McKayla Ross – who dub themselves “DIY detectives” – trying to figure out how to tell this story.

Even that sounds more intriguing than it is; it’s mostly them going on tangents involving spiritual mystics and pastel tea parties. There is something interesting here about the search for someone who perhaps doesn’t want to be found, as well as how this relates to issues of privacy in the digital age, and the ability to erase your digital footprint. But watching Jazmin and Olivia hold seances or consult tarot cards to aid in their journey becomes tiring.

There is also a quality to it that feels like performance art, which is probably the point; a title card at the beginning eerily talks about the blurring of fact and fiction, the obfuscation of truth. What we are left with is a case study in the push and pull of how much a filmmaker should be a subject in their own documentary. When Jazmin tracks down the white male programmers who created the fictional Black woman Mavis Beacon, she gushes over meeting them, only to tear them down in other scenes. But the audience is left without enough of an impression to really get an accurate read on them ourselves.

There is a really interesting short film buried inside this 102 minute documentary. But Jones is too loose with the form to pull it out, opting instead to craft something that feels like a mix of sincere investigative doc and too-online Gen Z vanity project. We are left with a bunch of threads that are only tangentially connected, ranging from internet conspiracies (they treat the Mandela Effect with the same seriousness as the rest of their cultural commentary), to vague identity politics, and new age spiritualism.

The problem is that Seeking Mavis Beacon can’t sustain itself for this long, especially once much of the air is let out of this central mystery. The idea of tracking down this model and exploring why so many assumed Mavis Beacon was a real person is worthwhile. But the documentary itself ends up feeling like a bit of a disappointing ruse.

Film Rating: ★★ (out of 4)

Seeking Mavis Beacon opens exclusively in theatres in limited release on September 27th, including at TIFF Lightbox in Toronto. It’s being distributed in Canada by Elevation Pictures.