93 min | NR | November 10, 2023 | Abramorama
A chaplaincy resident at Mount Sinai spends her days sitting with the dying and the terrified. The work demands she absorb other people’s grief without drowning in it. She is drowning.
Mati Engel is a chaplaincy resident at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. Her job is to sit with patients facing death and offer presence, not answers. The work is spiritual labor with no clear end and no measure of success. Luke Lorentzen follows her through a year of this, and the film becomes a study of what happens when a person who cares for the suffering runs out of capacity to care. This is not a film about faith. It is a film about the cost of bearing witness, and about the lie that caregivers can pour themselves out forever.
Mati Engel carries the film as herself, and the camera catches her in the act of breaking down in slow motion. She enters rooms composed and ready to absorb whatever the dying need from her. She leaves those rooms a little more hollowed out each time. David Fleenor plays her supervisor, the man tasked with guiding her through the residency and managing his own depletion at the same time. Their supervision sessions turn into the real drama of the film. Two people trained to hold others discover they have nothing left to hold each other.
Lorentzen directs and shoots the film himself, and the camerawork stays close and patient. He holds on faces long after the obvious moment has passed, and the silences do the work that dialogue would ruin. There is no score telling you how to feel. The sound design favors the hum of hospital rooms and the small noises of people choosing their next words. Lorentzen built his approach on the observational vérité of his earlier work, and here he trains it on interior collapse instead of external event.
The film refuses the redemption arc that the subject invites. Mati does not find a tidy reconciliation with the work or with herself. Lorentzen understands that burnout is not a crisis with a resolution. It is an erosion that keeps going after the credits roll. What he captures is the specific exhaustion of professional compassion, the way the demand to be present for everyone leaves nothing for the self. That is a harder and truer subject than uplift, and the film has the nerve to sit in it.