Beautifully shot and wonderfully acted
Ann Marie Fleming’s Can I Get A Witness begins as a gentle amble through a bright, sunshiney, summered and flowered landscape in an unnamed place. Ellie (Sandra Oh) makes sure her daughter Kiah (Keira Jang) is ready for when Daniel (Joel Roulette) arrives to take her through the first day on a new job, writes Michael Holland.
Everything looks normal but there is an air of everything not being quite right. The smiles are a little fake, the happiness that pervades the Elysian atmosphere appears to be hiding something bad. Nothing is in-your-face obvious but you know it’s there.
Daniel and Kiah turn up on their bicycles at people’s homes like Jehovah’s Witnesses. They are expected but the welcomes are subdued rather than warm. We wonder what their work is and work out that they are selling End-of-Life Plans that come with several options on where you die: champagne on the beach, a leafy glade with a partner, out on the lake or at home surrounded by family and familiarity. But the people signing up do not look like they are riddled with a life-ending disease, or of an age where death is imminent. They just look like middle-aged people without a care in the world. Until Daniel and Kiah come knocking.
Slowly but very surely, we notice that there are very few cars and that there are no old people; no planes fly over head, nobody is texting or calling on a smartphone… We ask ourselves why Ellie was so excited to have a fridge delivered, and why water is at a premium that can only be accessed at certain times of the day. We need our questions answered.
The script gives nothing away as to what this young couple actually bring to the door, there are no revelations or disclosures but there are small, drip-fed clues that gradually help build up a picture. We deduce that they are booking people in for dying the death of their own choice in their own special place, with the people they love. And this all happens when they reach the age of 50, and Kiah draws the people’s last live scenes on this earth because there are no cameras.
But why? There is no post-nuclear-apocalypse scenario here, the land and the buildings are all intact. The folk are not rotting away from radiation poisoning but are in their gardens growing fruit and vegetables.
It is at the end-of-day unwind sessions amongst the young Witnesses and Documentors, like Kiah and Daniel, that we get an idea of what happened to planet earth – Mankind woke up to AI taking over and Climate Change destroying the world, so switched everything off. Instead of 24 hour communication in a technological non-stop world of greed and power, they decided to share the natural, life-giving resources between everyone “instead of spending billions on keeping old people alive in rich countries while young people were dying of hunger and easily treatable diseases in developing countries”. This fact is revealed gently but smashes into you like a silent, electric Tesla.
But the payback for sustaining real equality for all was that the whole world agreed to live simply, have little or no carbon footprint, and commit to an expiry date of 50.
Of course, some 50-year-olds are going to ask questions and fight against the rules – it is human nature to stay alive – but there are museums where you can go and see the devastation caused by Climate Change, and discussion groups where you hear how nations would kill each other over land and resources. That information then becomes the reason to never go back to a world run on greed.
It ends with the mother and daughter shedding tears as Ellie nears her EOL Ceremony, but they understand why this is the way it is.
Can I Get A Witness is beautifully shot and wonderfully acted. There is a twee and idyllic ambience that lures you in to discover there is the dark side too, which is the film’s unique attraction. It is a film that will ask questions and raise debate and, hopefully, be the catalyst for some change.
Can I Get A Witness has already won awards and I’m guessing that when it opens here in selected cinemas on September 19th this very special film will win more.
