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Sundance 2025 Review: “Life After” Offers a Dynamic Look at the Right to Die

The “I Didn’t See You Here” director makes a strong case for disabled rights in looking back at Elizabeth Bouvia‘s argument for euthanasia.

“Segregation is part of the trauma of being disabled,” Reid Davenport says at one point in “Life After,” learning of the upbringing of Elizabeth Bouvia, whose case arguing for the right to die in a California court became a national flashpoint in 1983. The verdict didn’t go in her favor, having to continue to live in an assisted living facility with little hope of leaving when her physical health only deteriorated after she was born with cerebral palsy that resulted in her becoming a quadriplegic, but it’s her psychological health that Davenport, who previously reflected on his own life with cerebral palsy in his previous film “I Didn’t See You There,” is interested in exploring after Bouvia was moved to a care facility called Angel View as a teenager, a decision that may have seemed compassionate to her mother and stepfather who weren’t equipped to provide what she needed, but at the same time essentially cut off her connection to the outside world.

While Davenport’s perspective in “I Didn’t See You There” isn’t one that had been expressed before on screen so intimately, summoning the sensations and view he had from his wheelchair, “Life After” may be more conventional formally, but no less striking when he parses through past media coverage of Bouvia and other “right to die” campaigns in relation to those living with disability and finds that their perspective usually has been absent. Davenport actually wouldn’t have known about Bouvia at all until a book with a passage about Bouvia led him to Wikipedia where he couldn’t find out whether she was alive or dead. A search commences that ultimately takes him to meet her sisters Rebecca and Teresa Castner in Washington State, but the director parlays travel to the Pacific Northwest to across the border in Canada where a controversial law known as MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying) has been on the books since 2016, but recently expanded from those with a foreseeable expectation of death to include those with grievous disabilities.

When Davenport meets with Michal Kaliszan, who lives with spinal muscular atrophy, it’s understandable why he’s considering using the law to his benefit, but in terms of the moral responsibility of a society, it makes no sense that he has to worry about how he’ll be able to take care of himself after his mother, and primary caretaker, has passed, even with a steady job to help with the bills. The early scene sets up a compelling consideration throughout of how the disability itself is rarely a driving concern for a decision about assisted suicide, but rather the stress involved for others and the encouragement of a predominantly able-bodied society to make it seem like it’s in the best interest of the patient. Davenport revisits the deaths of 14-year-old Jerika Bolen in Wisconsin, who was celebrated for taking matters into her own hands, and Michael Hickson in Austin, who died of COVID when he appeared to be deprioritized by doctors due to his quadriplegia in the early months of the pandemic, but keeps returning to Bouvia to find many assumptions made about her upended by what her sisters reveal.

Davenport was the only one who could tell his own story in “I Didn’t See You There,” but he seems uniquely suited to tell this one as well when pointing out certain terminology employed by health care companies and ultimately the culture that soft pedals euthanasia as a good alternative to just making more room for the disabled in every day life and improving care and doors open for him specifically to broach a topic that generally goes undiscussed because of the stigma attached. Although Bouvia wasn’t afforded much of an existence in her time on earth, “Life After” ensures that she will have a continued presence and allows for others to never have to apologize for theirs.

“Life After” will screen again at the Sundance Film Festival on January 28th at 9:40 am at the Megaplex Redstone, January 30th at 12:30 pm at the Broadway Centre Cinemas, and January 31st at 6 pm at the Holiday Village Cinemas. It will also be available online from January 30th through February 2nd via the Sundance virtual platform.

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