What transpired with Marissa Marcel, a model turned starlet who vanished without a trace along with the three films she made? That’s the central mystery laid out for players to uncover in Immortality. You must sort through and match cut video clips from Marissa’s films Ambrosio (1969), Minsky (1970), and Two of Everything (1999) to gradually obtain answers and put the whole picture together.
Sam Barlow and Half Mermaid have brought players their most unsettling, complex, and intricate FMV game yet. The game goes down a surreal Lynchian rabbit hole with messages and moments that would leave you utterly floored.
10 Bizarre Illusions
From the game’s beginning, it becomes clear that something ominous is happening to Marissa. When certain sections of film clips are properly tweaked around through the editing interface, an entirely different woman appears as Marissa. And this happens throughout each of the three films.
The mysterious figure performs what seems like impossible illusions. In the ending of Ambrosio, the woman dances around the film location and then walks off a cliff, able to walk in midair. And in the 1999 scene where Marissa is filming a dance for motion capture, you can cut to her creating the illusion of three versions of herself dancing synchronously.
9 Marilyn Monroe Makes Her Entrance
In a jarring cut from the 1999 clip of Marissa singing happy birthday before discussing Marilyn Monroe in Two of Everything, the enigmatic woman appears abruptly in black and white again if you rewind the scene just right. This time she has the hairstyle and dress reminiscent of Marilyn Monroe, and also proceeds to sing happy birthday to juxtapose Marissa.
But it truly is Marilyn Monroe famously singing her happy birthday song to president JFK, just not as herself. It leads you to assume that the woman who took on Marissa’s body as a vessel has done the same with Marilyn at a previous point, which is quite surreal and fills you with more questions.
8 Three Face Change
Now here’s where things get even more twisty. When Marissa gazes into the mirror during a scene in Two of Everything, a new woman with long black hair and a Renaissance-era gown stares back at Marissa. The next time she appears is by altering the clip of a man in period clothing who morphs into her, and then she morphs back into the woman now posing as Marissa.
The blonde woman breaks the fourth wall and speaks directly to the players through the camera to ask, “How many times have I done this now?” Therefore, conveying that she’s been morphing forms for many years, jumping from one to the next. This explains how, at one point, she grabbed hold of Marylin Monroe and is now doing the same to Marissa Marcel.
7 Ambrosio's True Doom
The filming of Ambrosio takes an eerie turn and shows why the film probably never saw the light of day. The transformed Marissa decides to fatally stab the actor who plays Ambrosio and then licks his blood off the blade.
In a separate clip, her face replaces Ambrosio’s as she creepily caresses Sofia, a supporting actress in the scene, suggesting that ingesting his blood made it possible to transform into him. And it also becomes apparent that she can have multiple forms at once in a timeline.
6 The Other One
You eventually discover that the woman is not alone. There is a male entity, coined “The Other One,” with similar characteristics who inserts himself as an actor in the films she’s making. He interchanges between Satan in Ambrosio, the detective in Minsky, and the supporting actress Amy in Two of Everything.
He seems very attached to her. However, she wants to be rid of him because she can’t tolerate his hatred toward humanity. When he gives her an ultimatum, she chooses humanity and shoots him while filming a scene in Minsky, killing the actor whose body he took. And that’s, again, the reason why the film wasn’t released.
5 Director John Durick's Disappearance
John Durick was the cinematographer on Ambrosio, and then rose to director of Minsky and Two of Everything. After working together on Ambrosio, he continued to cast Marissa Marcel in his movies. His fate, however, grows more foreboding the farther you get in the game.
In the altered table read clip of Two of Everything, Durick disappears from the frame, and the other version of Marissa speaks directly to Amy, her eternal companion. And then, in the 1999 interview segment where he promotes Two of Everything, John’s face dissolves into the woman’s face, meaning that something drastic also happened to him.
4 The Purpose Revealed
An incredibly mind-blowing moment in Immortality is when there's the realization of who these entities are and what their true purpose is. In a confessional scene, the one assuming Marissa explains that the reason for their existence is to tell stories to humanity. When changing form in a bedroom scene in Ambrosio, she ascribes living through art as their optimal defense.
You later begin to see what exactly that means when a series of unusual phenomena start occurring to Marissa’s body in 1999. As Marissa’s popularity dwindles and her movies aren’t turning out as good, the loss of admiration for the art bleeds into reality, when there's blood pouring out of Marissa's head and nose.
3 The Adam And Eve Revelation
Here is where Barlow and company hit you with a sucker punch of a twist. An intriguing scene you can unlock through the fast-forward and rewind function is of the two beings depicted as Adam and Eve, signifying that they’re immortal and as old as the Earth itself.
Furthermore, in an altered Two of Everything clip from 1999, the male one holds a snake and says, “The apple and snake were my idea.” And what this essentially reveals is that they initiated their endeavors by changing into the bodies of Adam and Eve, and then used them as their vessel to perform and create the earliest biblical story.
2 Marissa's Tragic Backstory
A critical clip you can recover comes when Marissa carries a dying Sofia in Ambrosio's church scene. By reversing the clip, the immortal’s form comes through, and the actress lying on the ground becomes the actual Marissa clothed in traditional garb. It’s a recreation of how the being first found her and tasted her blood to absorb her.
Marissa Marcel was tending a field in a French village during World War II as the Nazis invaded. An ill tragedy befell her at the hands of the Germans, and she was barely living when the immortal being came across Marissa’s body, having awoken from a long slumber. She describes how she took her to a farmhouse and then became her.
1 The Ending
The game’s most shocking scene is undoubtedly the finale. The last clip on your grid doesn’t pertain to any of the three movies. Instead, it features the immortal entity assuming the form of Amy dousing Marissa in gasoline and setting fire to her body. Therefore, the bodily vessel is gone for good, and the question of what happened to Marissa Marcel gets resolved.
In sections of the game, you learn that fire is what ultimately kills their species. The ending, however, reveals that it couldn’t be further from the truth. The clips slowly begin dissolving into a moving image of the woman’s face, revealing that she persists within Immortality itself. Because games are a form of artistic medium played by countless players, it serves as her defense and allows her to remain.