Final Rating: 3.5/5
Director Ann Marie Fleming’s first feature film in eight years is a soft science fiction film that leaves plenty to chew on. In Can I Get A Witness?, we are transported to a near futuristic unnamed Canadian town. The details about this world trickle out slowly, gradually building the lore and giving out context clues that change how earlier scenes are viewed. The film stars Keira Jang as Kiah, a young woman who has been given a choice between mandatory military service or working for the government as a “witness”. Kiah lives with her mother Ellie (Sandra Oh) who is overprotective but still believes in her daughter.
While Kiah is getting ready for her first day of work a fridge is delivered to her house with the delivery people hook it up to electricity, noting that she is one of the few people to have access to it. Daniel (Joel Oulette) arrives on his bike, dressed like a Mormon salesman, to pick up Kiah for work. We learn that Daniel, and now Kiah, act as government approved witnesses to help with a version of assisted suicide for people that have reached the end of their time according to the the law.
They administer end of life (EOL) ceremonies in various steps. The first step is people are contacted by the government about their upcoming EOL, the second step is an in person visit from witnesses to help plan how they wish to go out. There are a number of traditional options like on the beach with friends and family, a sunrise or sunset one or even a mock non-denominational funeral service in a place of worship. The last step is the witnesses give the person a box that is filled with a gas that quickly and painlessly kills them at the end of the ceremony of their choosing.
Through each EOL meeting that Kiah and Daniel conduct, we learn more about the world. Sometime in 2025 a global catastrophe occurred where all nations on the planet had to come together to ensure that the man-made actions that lead to this can’t ever happen again. A worldwide pact is agreed upon where people that when they reach fifty agree to end their lives. This ensures there isn’t overpopulation or that aging people don’t put a strain on the medical system as they require more and more treatments for diseases.
In the thirty odd years since 2025, society has turned into a utopian world. Everyone lives in harmony, and while life certainly is different (lack of electricity, fresh water is rationed) people seemingly live normal existences. There is still a museum you can visit to watch old films (both Zoolander and Duck Soup mentioned in the same breath). This is assuming everyone continues to abide by the rule that at fifty, you must end your life. If you don’t willingly do it, the witnesses leave it up to government agents, who we are told can get aggressive. We never get to witness this act that would push the film away from gentle allegory to more fascist state police and it is probably for the best.
Kiah is hired to document the EOL ceremony as she possesses artistic skills. During the ceremony she quickly and accurately must sketch it for record keeping purposes. One participant wonders why they can’t just take a picture, but unfortunately with electricity being restricted they don’t have the power to do so and the chemicals needed to develop film are too harmful to the environment, so a charcoal sketch is the best option. That means Kiah must intently watch people die, something that is completely foreign to her.
A unique aspect is we get to see the imagination side of Kiah as her drawings come to life in animated flourishes. When she attends a stage two meeting with a woman who is coming to the end of her time and has a son who is wheelchair bound, she gives him wings that lift him out of his chair to symbolize a new form of mobility. Another time is while on a lake filled with lily pads she sketches water lilies that bloom and come to life in the water as Kiah and Daniel row back to the shore.
Keira Jang’s performance as Kiah strikes a good balance of a young person who thinks they know how the world works with a healthy degree of being confused by the past. At this current stage people who are agreeing to the EOL ceremonies all were alive when the cataclysmic event occurred. They are aware of the unjust society they used to live in along with the deadly effects that caused a near extinction event. People like Kiah and Daniel were born after the world changed and only know that world. Having to explain how a landline phone works or that refrigerator compressors constantly make sound is played for laughs but is done earnestly.
The film serves as a warning to our current state of affairs. It seems like every year there are weather events like atmospheric floods, wide sweeping forest fires, increased tsunamis, ice caps melting, all things that should be happening once every hundred years or so. Instead they are now a regular occurrence, with the planet screaming in our ears that we must change or things will get much worse. We skip over a Children of Men like situation, which has been depicted many times on film and instead look at how society recovers and moves forward.
Kiah argues about why people must die at fifty and it is hard to believe that society as a whole would agree to such a stipulation, but the movie and Ann Marie Fleming as writer and director lays out that concessions must be made. It is easy to argue on the surface that this is unfair, and as Kiah puts it, what if they have more life to live, but from a science fiction standpoint it raises interesting philosophical questions.
People seem to live off a plant based diet, as we currently know that raising animals explicitly for food consumption is not very environmentally friendly. They also mention that cell phones and personal computers don’t exist anymore because the materials needed to produce these electronics were harmful to mine and that people lost their souls to them.
Because this film doesn’t take a darker look at the future like In Time where the rich can literally buy time to live past the age of 25 or something out of the Mad Max world where society has become lawless, this film is easy to dismiss. Perhaps the most illogical aspect is believing that humanity could all agree on the one thing that would save the world, a hilarious thought when you couldn’t even get everyone to wear a cloth mask in public places to not spread an infectious disease a few years ago.
But that is what makes science fiction so great, is you can take a kernel of something and look at what it would be like implemented on a larger scale. We run the gamut of people not being happy with this system. One man is ready to go on a conspiracy rant until his wife reminds him that he promised not to complain, another man tries to stall the clock by telling long winded jokes and one says he will only go if Daniel and Kiah shoot him.
It also makes you think how you as the viewer would want to go under the same circumstances. Would it be after the best meal ever, or perhaps with all your friends and family, or maybe finishing a quality book and being at peace with the world?
Sandra Oh has a small but memorable part that culminates with the final scene as you understand everything she has been doing in the background has come together for a touching final scene in the film. The film might be a little too twee at times, but the unique look at a utopian/dystopian society is more than worth the run time.
Thank you to Mongrel Media and StarPR for the screener.
