Kardec

Kardec (2019) is a Brazilian period drama you can watch online on iFILM. Director Wagner de Assis traces how a skeptical Paris schoolteacher, Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail, became Allan Kardec — the figure whose name is tied to the birth of Spiritism.

Leonardo Medeiros leads the cast as a respected educator and textbook author who first dismisses the craze for turning tables and conversations with the dead. Curiosity gets the better of him, and he agrees to test the mediums with his own rigorous methods. What he witnesses cracks open everything he believed about reason. From there the film follows his life's work: transcribing answers, organizing them into doctrine, and clashing with both the church and the scientific establishment over a book that would travel far beyond France.

The approach is restrained, with almost no supernatural spectacle — the focus stays on the man and on a mid-1800s Paris arguing over the limits of the rational. It speaks most to viewers drawn to the biography of a real historical figure and the history of ideas, rather than anyone hunting for a ghostly scare. Stream Kardec (2019) online on iFILM.