Life After: a nuanced interrogation of right-to-die policy

• Reviewed from the 2025 Sundance Film Festival 

In 1983, Elizabeth Bouvia, a 26-year-old American with cerebral palsy, entered a hospital for the purpose of ending her life, but her attempt was rebuffed in the courts. In Life After, Reid Davenport revisits the case and embarks on an insightful consideration that braids together philosophical, personal, and political implications, to create a film essay on disabled experience. On the policy front, he also illuminates (and, for many viewers, exposes) how right-to-die initiatives can have chilling results. 

Davenport, who directed the Sundance-premiered essay film I Didn’t See You There (2022), begins with the formal trappings of a personal investigation doc. He wonders aloud how Bouvia dropped out of view despite making headlines around her case (and garnering the requisite skin-crawling Mike Wallace interview on the TV series 60 Minutes). Eventually finding two sisters of Bouvia’s, he also includes incisive conversations with a woman whose hospitalised disabled husband was deemed better off dead by a doctor, and with a man lacking sufficient home care who considers ending his life (to be clear, the film focuses on cases of people with disability, rather than cases of terminal illness). 

All of which boils down to attacks on the autonomy of disabled people, which Davenport explains in what might be one platonic ideal of succinct documentary voiceover: clarifying and questioning and reacting. (Paraphrased, one such comment observes: “Disabled people are not threatened by our bodies but by other people’s bodies.”) The filmmaker also appears on screen, in colloquies with one of his producers, Colleen Cassingham, grappling with his own ongoing responses to right-to-die policy-making and attitudes generally, as he has cerebral palsy. 

Case in point is MAID, or Medical Assistance in Dying, a law passed in Canada in 2016 that caused disability activists and others to sound the alarm. The big strength of Life After is its level of nuance and resistance to pat portrayals of issues, and with MAID, we learn how its loose criteria and swift application process results in encouraging death as a better, less costly alternative, treating disability as somehow inherently incompatible with “quality of life.” MAID promotional materials, including a children’s book, feel like something out of a dystopian movie; Davenport even fills out the online application, demonstrating the scarily simple process for dying but also personally reflecting on the pressures placed by the abled world (one example given of an approved MAID application is a 27-year-old with autism and AHDH). 

The MAID thread – including contentious Zoom debates in Canadian parliament sessions – becomes intertwined with a kind of reconstructed biography of Bouvia’s life. Her sisters recount the “godawful surgeries” that caused her such pain (largely ignored by care workers) and describe the independence she fiercely held onto, later becoming a social worker. Along with the decisions of the man facing a home care crisis, Bouvia’s full story shows Davenport’s skill in following the true, evolving contours of the people the film discusses rather than slotting them in as examples in your typical “issue documentary.” 

Instead, the well-argued Life After at once has a clear point of view and maintains some narrative surprise as to where it assorted threads will lead. Perhaps Davenport’s most enduring rhetorical message (expressed in many of his reality-check voiceovers) is one of refusing the options given when the options are not viable. What might sound like an activist stance simply becomes a necessary personal one in a world of institutions and policies that pose matters of life and death in such risky terms as MAID does. 

The film’s well-chosen stories get at the heart of the conflicting concepts of mercy embraced in decisions around assisted suicide. One example given is Jerika Bolen, a Wisconsin teenager with muscular dystrophy, who chose to die in hospice; her community rallies to give her a special dream prom celebration, and Davenport’s control of tone conveys exactly how queasy the spectacle feels. At the policy level, such support can feel rather more cynical, as in a sequence of American politicians pushing for an equivalent to MAID. 

Given how the US healthcare system currently functions (or doesn’t), it’s possible to extrapolate extremely dire consequences of widespread application of something like MAID, in which it’s officially deemed cheaper to let someone die. But as clearly and subtly as Davenport conveys the implications of the right-to-die policy, he maintains a grounded sense of compassion and an appreciation for the human complexity in every story that he brings into the fold of this film.