I approach this film with the perspective that despite the zodiac, I always defer to female perspectives on health. Having more movie finales with hospital beds than space robots makes for a better-qualified comment. So where does my sexist bias place Emmy-nominated Serena DC? Director, producer, and presenter of Beyond The Grave, she opens her film by saying she believes there is a soul separate from the body and that it continues without it, so immediately she has my attention and something to flesh out (or not).
The film is an uneven package of library footage and interviews. Spoiler: There really isn’t much more to it than closing with the same belief it opens with. This despite none of the interviews moving the needle towards it. She meets Mary Telliano, an ‘end-of-life coach’ who resembles a tattooed Serena DC. Telliano provides mysticism and palliative care to the terminally ill. She says her photos of a dying client perhaps show the soul leaving the body and seems to venture that fear of death is a product of patriarchy. I didn’t get anything from her.
DC then encounters neurosurgeon Eben Alexander, who was in a coma and came back to write about it in best sellers. He insists his near-death experience proves memories aren’t stored in the brain, which can’t have helped his neurosurgery. Adam Curry talks credibly about the mystery of how these experiences all seem similar, but he’s a web developer.
“…believes there is a soul separate from the body and that it continues without it…”
The film gets massively interesting when we reach Max More, Ph.D.’s self-titled “Strategic Philosopher.” Highly muscled, he is shot with a furtive style that makes you not trust him with your nail clippings. The President Emeritus of Alcor, which has a literal head count of 200 people in hopeful cryostasis, he is the highlight of this film, casually describing the interesting mechanics of cryogenics to a fascinated DC. The best bit is when she worries people might be frozen conscious, and More cheerily assures her nothing survives the embalming! He counters DC’s prevailing theory, which feels like good journalism – a nice rounding error from the wildness of cryo science, but the other interviewees still felt empty-handed.
I suppose my big issue here (I know I am being a blowhard) is that I want rockets to fly and electric bikes not to fry. I want diplomatic technocrats to build peace and cooperation between nations so my children can enjoy bad coffee in space, like in Star Wars. With it’s space robots. What Serena DC says here has a grain of superstition that puts me off. The film is well enough put together, though it relies heavily on stock footage (fish, clouds, abstract CGI models, etc). It’s beautifully done all the same.
There is an old expression in computing. GIGO – Garbage In, Garbage Out. None of this is garbage (DC stages and shoots her interviews well), but the participants mostly bring little, which documentaries do or die by. It’s always going to be an interesting topic, but it needs more wrestling into shape than was done here. I like DC’s style and wouldn’t mind seeing more of her films, but this one was an empty vessel for me.
