Can I get a Witness? review - time to die before you get old

Some time in the not too distant future, there are only two films on offer: Duck Soup, and, if you order the DVD in advance, Zoolander. And you have to watch them in a museum.

Canadian director Ann Marie Fleming’s unusual, semi-dystopian fantasy is shot by C Kim Miles in the gorgeous Powell River area of British Columbia. In spite of excellent performances from the two leads, Sandra Oh and Keira Jang, it fails to come to life and has a clunky, didactic feel, though it looks very pretty.

Ellie (Oh) lives with her daughter Kiah (Jang) in a charming wooden house with a beautiful garden where she grows flowers and vegetables. It soon becomes apparent that everyone lives in this bucolic, Whole Earth-Catalogue-y way, because after the fires and floods of 2025, somehow (yes, how?) the world came to an agreement to discard technology and unite in its efforts to stop climate change and world poverty. Everyone bicycles and skateboards and there are no phones. You're only allowed to have one child. It’s worked really well. Sounds good? The only catch is that you're forced to die at 50 for the sake of the planet.

Teenage Kiah, a talented artist, has opted to become a witness or documentor of end of life ceremonies (the other possibility is joining the military) and we meet her on her first day on the job, also her birthday. Just as as her mentor Daniel (Joel Oulette; both pictured below) arrives, so does a refrigerator for Ellie, an eco-rated model from 30 years ago. The significance of the fridge is not clear for a while, and neither is Daniel’s gift of a bottle of champagne and a wooden box.

Daniel sounds robotic and looks prim, though he likes showing off his pecs when grave-digging. At first he and the more laid-back Kiah (she's wearing a vintage dress, but now everything is vintage) seem unsuited as a team. Their job is to visit various people whose time is up and for Kiah to sketch them before and after their deaths (little animations spring from her pen and float off into the ether). There are various EOL scenarios on offer: a sunrise transition, a beach-side party with music and champagne. And sometimes it goes wrong. "I'll go, but you're gonna have to make me," says a recalcitrant chap. Daniel tut-tuts about violence and how it reverberates.

One man tries to put off his EOL event by showing them his nifty compost-making invention; another, on a boat, won’t stop telling jokes and offering lemonade and sandwiches; one woman performs a Japanese tea ceremony before she and her husband, who says he was never down for this mandatory EOL bullshit, die by the remarkably fast-acting purple gas which emerges from the wooden box presented to them by Daniel (even the gas looks pretty). She was only 49, he tells Kiah, but preferred not to go on living without her husband. This is all traumatically new to Kiah, who vomits and sobs.

“We’re helping the planet out,” says Daniel, who’s hardened to the sight of dead bodies and is prone to platitudes such as “the world is your oyster.” Well, it isn't really, as no one is able to travel any more. Kiah is more plaintive. The system doesn’t seem fair: some people love life more than others. She’ll never have kids. Why bother? “They’re just gonna die after watching you die.”

At a debriefing session, before the obligatory Duck Soup viewing in the museum (its plot is lost on Kiah, who apparently knows nothing of warring nations), one of the team leaders explains how the great acceleration, barely 100 years ago, led to AI becoming “faster and better than us…we had to pull the plug.”

Meanwhile Ellie, who worked as a smoke-jumper in the wildfires of 2025, is preparing for her own EOL event by finishing a quilt and plugging in her old smartphone so she can show photos to Kiah, who’s amazed to see her grandparents and her mother in various exotic locations in the old days when travel was possible. In the end, it all feels rather top-heavy, as if the message overpowered what could have been a great story.

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