89 min | PG-13 | October 2, 2020 | Netflix
Kirsten Johnson’s father is dying slowly. So she kills him over and over on camera, with stunt doubles and fake blood, to rehearse the loss she cannot stop. It is the most loving thing a daughter has ever filmed.
Kirsten Johnson is a documentary cinematographer who knows a camera can hold a person long after they are gone. Her father, Dick Johnson, is a retired psychiatrist sliding into dementia. So she stages his death again and again, with stunt coordinators, fake blood, and a falling air conditioner. The film is not really about dying. It is about a daughter rehearsing a loss she cannot prevent and using cinema to cheat the clock.
Dick Johnson plays himself with a generosity that anchors every scene. He climbs back up after each staged death, brushes himself off, and laughs at the absurdity of attending his own funeral. Kirsten Johnson works both sides of the lens, directing her father into staged danger and flinching at what she sets in motion. Her children, Isla and Jed Sierck, drift through the margins as the generation that will inherit these images. Raymond Damazo and the Torres family fill the heaven sequences, where the dead eat chocolate and dance.
Kirsten Johnson directs and co-writes with Nels Bangerter, her editor from Cameraperson. Each death plays straight until the camera pulls back to expose the stunt crew, the foam debris, and the makeup artist fitting a double into Dick’s clothes. The film reveals its own machinery in nearly every sequence. The staged heaven uses deliberately handmade effects, with glitter, confetti, and a body double whose stiff prosthetic feet give away the trick. Bangerter cuts the manufactured fantasy against handheld footage of a real man misplacing his keys and losing his words. The contrast does the emotional work that no single death scene could.
The film understands that you cannot rehearse the death of someone you love. Johnson tries anyway, because trying is the only thing the camera lets her do. Every staged accident becomes a way of saying the unsayable out loud and then surviving it. The result is a documentary about denial that never lies to itself. It turns a daughter’s terror into a celebration without pretending the terror is gone.