Who is going to watch you die—is an immediate question that comes to mind after watching the 2024 Canadian sci-fi Can I Get a Witness, which speaks about a world where human beings come with an expiry date. Anne Marie Fleming’s dystopian world is not in ruins—but we see uninterrupted nature, grassy meadows, and pristine beaches—all because the humans of the future took a collective decision. A decision to save the planet by ending human lives at the mark of fifty. While overpopulation and the scarcity of natural resources have become the biggest threat to our beloved home planet, the film asks whether human beings will end up choosing the existence of the collective over the lives of their closest ones.
Spoilers Ahead
What does an End of Life Witness do?
End of Life Witnesses are essentially a pair of state-employed adolescents present with the dying person at the time of their death. It is upon them to carry out any last wishes, orchestrate a quiet and beautiful death as per the dying man’s choice, and archive their last footprint on earth on a sketch. Daniel and Kiah are such a pair that we follow for two days as they go knocking on people’s doors and become their last memory on earth.
Can I Get a Witness starts on Kiah’s birthday, where her mother dresses her up for the initiation. Her first encounter with Daniel feels as if it’s a premise for a formal date, even a prom date—but soon we realize that Daniel is there to train Kiah to take on her role as an End of Life artist. She is to document the deaths in her sketches, as photographs can fade in a couple of decades, and printing involves harmful chemicals. Kiah’s role as an artist is to witness the tender moment of death and archive it on paper. Following the narrative, the film superimposes animations of Kiah’s sketches in its visuals, elevating the film to a level where Kiah’s vision feels inseparable from the film’s visuals. In fact, Kiah’s initiation as an End of Life artist symbolizes that every year lived, is a year taken from another person too old for the planet. The human beings of the afterworld are bartering their time to prolong their existence on the face of the earth.
Daniel is the one executing the death sentences, and Kiah accompanies Daniel on her birthday as her first day as an End of Life Witness. On her first job, Kiah watches as Daniel negotiates his way of offering last rites to a woman with a differently abled child—who she is leaving with her daughter. Kiah plays a last piano piece for the woman, resonating the imminent death through music. Kiah and Daniel travel to various ceremonies—they meet a Japanese woman who is only forty-nine but chooses to die with her husband after a ceremonial tea-making and a beautiful exchange with her husband. We meet a fisherman, who is like a dystopian Scheherazade, delaying the moment of death by telling endless stories of horses, dogs, and other animals. We meet a man in a solitary cabin who will only accept death by gunshot and a woman who would prefer champagne on the beach before her death. The end-of-life choices are beautiful but limited—like a quiet ceremony with friends or alone on a fisherman’s boat—never brutal, almost as if blanketing the harsh reality. When people resist or refuse to give in to these choices, as instructed in a support group gathering, the witnesses are supposed to call “Compliance”–we never get to see the full extent of how the compliance works. Perhaps it is an absolute, extreme way of doing what needs to be done.
Daniel and Kiah—a budding romance in a broken world
When Daniel arrives on Kiah’s birthday to take her for her training, dressed to the nines, a comely young man, it feels like he is there to take Kiah out on a date. Kiah’s mother serves him a strawberry and rhubarb pie as he waits for Kiah to come down the stairs. A classic teen film scene, except that the world has changed. But does the heart of the young change so easily?
Daniel and Kiah are forced to grow up in a world that demands so much of them—it turns them into gentle murderers, and the shared, quiet grief is intimate between them. Daniel leads Kiah when she hesitates with handing out the box of death. Daniel understands this because, like Kiah, he once experienced death for the first time on his first day. As they move from one person to the other, delivering their ultimatum, they move closer too. Kiah feels disillusioned by a world where children come into being with a death sentence hanging over their head. Daniel reveals that he lost his mother as a newborn, and her memory is a void that he can never experience—leaving us to reflect on the question of whether a life lived and then ended at a mark or the denial of it by not choosing to create a progeny is the right choice.
Daniel and Kiah grow close as friends, as sharers of many people’s shared fates throughout their journey, and after the last ceremony, we see them sitting by the beach, holding the same champagne flutes used for the End of Life ceremony. Daniel asks whether Kiah likes the taste of the champagne, and she says, “It tastes like socks.” Daniel proceeds to throw away his champagne in hand, flutes, and everything, and Kiah follows suit. Perhaps what is designed to look beautiful as a means to an end is actually not as beautiful—maybe death does smell like socks. It is not champagne, and sunsets, and a quiet passage by the beach.
Does Kiah Witness Her Mother’s Demise?
End of life is an abrupt silence—as an artist, Kiah’s job was to immortalize the moment through her artwork. However, it is difficult to sustain artistic objectivity when the death sentence enters the premises of your own home. In the beginning of the film, we see an unexpected refrigerator delivery to Kiah’s mother. It is unexpected because, in the near future of the film, all technological devices have been banned. When Daniel arrives, he presents Kiah’s mother with a bottle of champagne. Later, in the last End of Life ceremony that Kiah and Daniel attend, there is a refrigerator in the woman’s house with two champagne flutes and a bottle of champagne. The refrigerator is sent by the state as a means to achieve the last wish—a scripted death scene with chilled champagne. The refrigerator delivery at Kiah’s doorstep heralds the same end for her mother as her birthday nears.
On a quiet evening after Kiah returns home from her work, Kiah and her mother share the bottle of champagne sent by Daniel. The drink foreshadows her departure, although she seems to be willingly going into it. Her words to Kiah to reinstate her faith in the resolution collectively taken by humanity are a testament to her strength, but also to the helpless future that we are leaving for the next generations. She believes, and she has no other choice but to believe, that there is no other way to save the earth. She states that the Constitution of Human Rights and Responsibilities has resolved the issue of overpopulation. It is also revealed that Kia’s mother herself used to be an End-of-Life artist—it is a beautiful way that the film shows that life goes on cyclically, from mother to daughter, from older to younger.
The End that Shows the Beginning
In the end, Kiah and her mother have a conversation and a recollection of the past from her mother’s point of view. However, what feels like the past to Kiah is the exact year we are living in. We hear Kiah’s mother say that travel was banned in 2025. Kiah is surprised to even imagine what would make people travel in the past. Her mother answers that traveling meant knowing the world, looking inside—something that felt so natural that in the course of it we forgot to take care of the planet we were traveling across.
We have seen Kiah carry an old backpack with a “save the planet” patch—but this time, Kiah’s mother brings out a box full of old relics—a mobile phone and some old photographs. Kiah gets to see her grandparents for the first time; she sees her mother’s travel photos, as well as the origin of her name. Reminiscing about the life she has lived, Kiah’s mother tells her that she used to be a smokejumper—along with her best friend, Kiah. We see the planet’s demise through cellphone photographs—flaming volcanoes, overflowing lava, and two brave women winning against the smoke. Except that one of them was lost. Kiah—the best friend—died while smoke jumping, but Kiah’s mother immortalized her soul by naming her daughter after her. This extends the theme of cyclical rebirth that the film carries deep within its soul—nothing ever dies; it just returns in a different form.
In Can I Get a Witness’ ending, Kiah has no choice but to accept the fate that was already chosen for her—to be a quiet witness to deaths that could have been avoided if we’d let the planet breathe just a little more. In the course of time, she will have to normalize the process, accept her job as just a job, and be a bystander to all the deaths that take place before her eyes. However, there will be silent hauntings, sleepless nights, and dwindling resources that will choke her in the most private moments. While the writer-director gives us a window into this dystopia, it is a warning sign for us to stop. Pandora’s box has been opened, but can we at least try closing its lid? The film can remain just a film and not become an overbearing reality if we step up and do our part—if every day, we help the planet breathe a little more.
