This article contains mentions of death and dying.
“How much time is enough?”
I’ll be the first to say that growing old is a privilege — and an environmental liability. It’s usually a dark thought I mull over under blankets and within bedroom walls. That was, until I caught UBC alumna Ann Marie Fleming’s sci-fi drama Can I Get a Witness? at this year's Vancouver International Film Festival.
It’s this line that is brought up about halfway into the film, agonizingly summarizing the premise of Fleming’s plot which tucks itself away in every interaction, every corner of an almost too familiar future society that has adapted to the climate crisis. A place where no one travels the world, we’re in touch with nature and we die at 50 — all because it’s good for the planet.
The film carries all the innocent and charming undertones of a coming-of-age film — or perhaps it’s more like coming to age — as Keira Jang’s character Kiah, a timid, almost-girl-next-door artist is tasked to shadow Daniel (Joel Oulette), and the two grow into their own acute awareness of their mortality as the plot progresses.
The film is visually stunning. It captures the warmth of the Pacific Northwest with yellowy, greenish hues and panoramic dazing stills. The camera playfully shakes, like two eyes watching, and at times, Kiah’s notepad comes to life with colourful visuals floating across the screen.
The film follows the pair carry out their duties as official witnesses to citizens who have reached the end of their time. Daniel bears a wooden box, Kiah a notepad and pencils, to document these final moments of a person’s life. As these people absorb their surroundings, Daniel must oversee their deaths with a mysterious euthanizing substance as Kiah records the process with a detailed sketch.
What does this say about being human? Are we not breaking the fourth wall and concluding that this is all so traumatic? But I watched with a tilted head at Vancouver Playhouse, baffled to see that most people go peacefully without restraint. It seems that when death is an expected duty and in your hands, it's liberating.
The Ink Spots’s “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire” recurred in blended themes — I saw people being people until their last breath, some sipping tea with a lover, others letting their voices touch the air with a song or story one last time out in the woods. In this version of reality, you can not be ready to go, but still be okay with that, knowing that this space is bigger than you.
And maybe that’s all the movie is — just a collection of unsettling endings that tap into a component of the human condition that seems to sit beside you. But I so desperately wanted it to be more than that.
I yearned for my stomach to churn, to hold my breath, to watch something unfold that shows us how the hell humanity got to this shared understanding of existence. But instead, I attended to monologues hashing out chains of catastrophic events that, by my calculations, should be happening next year; heard whispers of hypotheticals laws that’ll be passed in the next 10 years and stories from older characters who shamefully spoke of their large carbon footprint, forest fires, human displacement and the eradication of world poverty.
Many questions go unanswered in the film — whether accidental or to pique abstract interpretations of its premise. What does mass controlled euthanization have to do with getting grounded as a species or solving socio-economic and environmental crises if we exist in the first place? Dare I say, leaving an explanatory gap is an easy way out of unpacking a pessimistic resolution to the mess we live in today.
But what I did see clearly was a little bit of myself in Kiah. We share the same fears, we get a visceral reaction to thinking about existence or seeing death, we get emotional when we remember how fleeting the things we love are. And in a way, it humanizes everything Can I Get a Witness? wants to explore.
It’s these little glimmers of emotion amidst the choice in how these characters decide to die that pulls you in as an observer, all the way to the last scene. You feel like an intruder in a deeply intimate and bittersweet mother-daughter moment. And for a film that touches on themes of human connection, being and love, I’d like to think this abrupt ending is intentionally symbolic.
Through watery eyes, Sandra Oh’s character, Kiah’s mother, soothes her daughter as her trembling hand moves toward the paper.
“Shouldn’t you be drawing this?”
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