Sundance review: 'Life After' probes an '80s plea for medically assisted death, and opens up the complicated history of the issue
In two documentaries — his 2022 film “I Didn’t See You There” and now with “Life After” — director Reid Davenport proves he’s quite adept at making viewers look at the world through a different perspective, as seen from his wheelchair.
“Life After” starts with the story of Elizabeth Bouvia, a California woman who in 1983 — at age 26 — went to court to gain the right to decide when she could die, with the help of medical professionals. Bouvia had cerebral palsy (as Davenport does), and argued that the pain she was experiencing because of her condition made her life unbearable, and she wanted to right to choose when to end that life.
It’s not a spoiler to say that Bouvia lost that court case. What’s more fascinating is what Davenport learns next — that there is very little record of what happened to Bouvia after that landmark case. At his computer, talking to his producer, Colleen Cassingham, Davenport asks a provocative question: What if Bouvia, who would be in her 60s, was still alive?
The mystery of Boulia’s case opens up a whole line of questioning for Davenport, about the nature of so-called “medically assisted death” policies, where the practice is legal and what they say about the society that allows them.
I will admit that, in my ableist liberal way, I had not thought much about this subject — and if I had, I’d say I was generally supportive of the idea that a person gets to make their own choices about their medical care, including the right to decide to stop getting any. But Davenport’s movie makes a persuasive argument that such a right is only fair if the person offered that right has a real alternative.
Davenport takes the example of Canada, which has had “medical assistance in dying” or MAiD on the books since 2016. At first, the law only applied to people for whom death was foreseeable in the near term. In 2021, though, Canada’s Parliament amended the law, to include people who had “grievous and irremediable” illness, even if that illness would not be likely to bring death reasonably soon. (In fairness to Parliament, a couple of provincial supreme courts ruled in 2019 that MAiD could not be limited to people on the verge of dying.)
Davenport notes in the film that Canada’s rates of allowing MAiD have risen sharply in recent years. He also presents the counter-argument that in that same period of time, the amount of money Canada’s national and provincial governments spend on care for disabled people — the sort to care that would make living with a disability more tolerable — has not gone up. In other words, Davenport argues, MAiD has become an insurance executive’s dream: A treatment that’s cheaper than home care, and only needs to be paid for once.
Davenport presents his case as any good documentarian would, with well-marshaled facts sprinkled with anecdotes of people who embody the issue at hand. The most sustained anecdote is Bouvia’s, told by her family and through her own writings. Davenport gives Bouvia’s story the space and respect it deserves, as it depicts her as a pioneer of a particular human right that none of us want to exercise unless we have to.
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‘Life After’
★★★1/2
Screening in the U.S. Documentary competition of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Screens again: Tuesday, January 28, 9:40 a.m., Redstone 2, Park City; Thursday, January 30, 12:30 p.m., Broadway 6, Salt Lake City; Friday, January 31, 6 p.m., Holiday 1, Park City. Online screenings Thursday, January 30, 8 a.m. to Sunday, February 2, 11:55 p.m. (All times Mountain time zone.) Not rated, but probably PG-13 for language and thematic material involving suicide. Running time: 100 minutes.