101 min | NR | October 7, 2022 | MTV Documentary Films
Eli Timoner has decided to die. His family gathers to film the last weeks of his life as he ends it on his own terms through medically assisted death. His daughter points the camera at the one subject she cannot edit.
Eli Timoner is a former airline founder, stroke survivor, and patriarch facing the end of his life. He chooses medical aid in dying, and his family gathers in his Los Angeles bedroom to spend his final days with him. The film documents the fifteen days between that decision and his death. Ondi Timoner turns the camera on her own father and refuses the distance that documentary usually grants. This is not a film about death as an abstraction. It is a film about the logistics of love when a deadline is fixed and the family is in the room.
Eli Timoner sits at the center as himself, frail and lucid and apologetic for the burden he believes he is. His repeated insistence that he was a failure becomes the emotional argument the family spends the film dismantling. Lisa Timoner, his wife of decades, tends to him with a practiced calm that cracks only in private moments the camera catches anyway. Rachel Timoner, the daughter who is a rabbi, brings liturgy and ritual into the bedroom and gives the dying a structure. David Timoner and the extended family fill the house with grandchildren and small talk, and the film lets those ordinary exchanges run long enough to feel like real time.
Ondi Timoner directs and writes, and she builds the film around a ticking clock rendered in plain title cards counting down the days. The structure converts the abstract dread of mortality into a calendar. The cinematography stays close and handheld inside the cramped bedroom, and the proximity removes any safe vantage point for the viewer. Archival footage of Eli as a young aviation entrepreneur intercuts with the present, and the contrast between the vigorous man and the bedridden one does the film’s heaviest lifting. The sound design favors silence and the mechanical hum of medical equipment over any score that would tell you how to feel.
The film earns its intimacy by refusing to flinch and refusing to perform. It sits in the discomfort of watching a man receive the medication that ends his life surrounded by people who love him. The risk of this material is sentimentality, and Timoner avoids it by keeping the camera on specific gestures rather than grand statements. What lingers is the gap between how Eli sees his life and how his family sees it. The film makes its case that he was wrong about himself, and it makes that case by simply staying in the room until the end.