Into The Night: Portraits of Life and Death

We don’t know how. We don’t know when. But death comes for us all. It is the roar underneath everything. To be human is to wrestle with this truth and with the great unanswered question: How do we live with death in our eye? To borrow from Dylan Thomas (whose poem opens the film) do we go gently or raging against the dying light? Do we depart with equanimity or with anger? With clenched fists or more commonly with denial? Or do we see death as something to be fought and even possibly conquered, a challenge increasingly pursued by some of the brightest scientific minds? Finally, what are the stories we tell ourselves? Whether shaped by religion, science, art, the natural world, the power of love, do these narratives sustain us or do they fall away when we suddenly find ourselves ‘with skin in the game.’ Into the Night; Portraits of Life and Death, a two hour documentary, features men and women of uncommon eloquence and intelligence who are grappling with these questions. For them death is no longer an abstraction far off in the future, it is real. Visceral. They come from all walks of life, all ages, dying and healthy, believers and unbelievers, well known and obscure. Among them: an astrophysicist, a small town Baptist minister, a Cambridge philosopher, a cryonicist, a Broadway actor, a futurist, and a Mayo Clinic heart surgeon. Whether through a dire prognosis, the imminence of their own death, the loss of a loved one, a sudden epiphany, or a temperament born to question, these are people who have been shocked into mortality and are forever changed. Ultimately the film is meant to raise questions, not to provide answers. How could it? Death is “that undiscovered country,” as Hamlet so famously described it, “from whose bourn/No traveler returns.”

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