Life has four seasons: spring, summer, autumn and winter. What if someone decide to cut the last season out, and ensured that everyone’s journey terminated immediately after their leaves turned yellow and fell? In Can I Get a Witness, humans are no longer allowed to enjoy the winter of their lives: old age.
The story takes place roughly 20 years from now. The world is a very different place, reshaped by a major event. In the year of 2025, computers became so smart that they threatened to overtake us human beings. So we had to permanently unplug them, as well as delete extensive data repositories. Suddenly humanity had to reinvent itself, this time with a much stronger awareness of our impact on the environment, and of our ability to damage each other. So someone came up with the brilliant idea: let’s kill people at the age of 50, allowing the young to prevail and enjoy their lives more thoroughly. And let’s make it a beautiful party, dubbed an EDL (“end of life”) celebration, so that the departing ones don’t complain about their miserable fate. And let’s make that compulsory, by establishing a “universal human declaration”.
Every dying person must be accompanied by two young people. The macabre “celebration” normally takes place ina beautiful and idyllic setting, such as a lake or a meadow. The 50-year-old opens a box, purple smoke comes out… and poof! They drop dead. The two young witnesses (hence the film title) wear a mask during the ordeal, in order to prevent inhaling the deadly substance. Yet they can hardly conceal the expression of horror on their face.
It will take you about half of this 111-minute film to work out the plot and social commentary of this film. The beginning of the story is infused with artistic devices that – while charming and well executed – fulfil no narrative purpose. Other than make the film look cute and poetic. This is mostly through animated drawings. A literal black cloud hangs over someone’s head. Scribbles on a notebook acquire a lease of life. A foxglove purges a colourful fragrance. And flowers fly out of an old-fashioned gramophone. That’s when we meet Ellie (Sandra Oh). She’s very concerned about her new fridge, and mostly indifferent about the impending day of her departure. Her two experienced witnesses are her own daughter Kiah (Keira Jang) and her co-worker Daniel (Joel Oulette).
Much of the story consists of Ellie sharing snippets of the past (before the foiled computer coup of 2025) with her daughter. Because digital no longer exists, they must watch films on film, with 1933’s Duck Soup (Leo McCarey) being a strange favourite amongst cinema lovers. Ben Stiller’s Zoolander (2001) too is a much sought-after item. In fact, it needs to be booked in advance. It’s indeed a strange world one where these two movies represent the best of the pre-digital era. One if left to wonder what to happened to the entire Hitchcock collection. Somehow, Ellie managed to retain a tablet with some digital images of her youth. Kiah is enraptured by the pictures.
The reflections proposed by Can I Get a Witness are shallow and predictable: “is it selfish to live past 50?”; or “is it painful for children to watch their parents die, or is that just an integral past of the cycle of life?”. Philosophical platitudes that fail to rescue the story from banality. Another problem is that the script is heavily reliant on dialogue, but the conversations lack freshness and spontaneity. The characters are lukewarm, while the script is protracted and confusing. Despite the relatively long runtime and small numbers of protagonists, the character development is still thin, as is our emotional allegiance with the story
Can I Get a Witness? premiered in the Official Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. In cinemas on Friday, September 19th (2025).
