‘Life After’ review: Assisted understanding | Sundance 2025

Directed by Reid Davenport, Life After unpacks the legacy of Elizabeth Bouvia’s right-to-die case and the ongoing fight for disability care.

NOTE: This review of Life After discusses topics of assisted suicide, disability discrimination, medical neglect, institutionalization, and systemic ableism. It includes references to real cases of euthanasia, loss of autonomy, and discussions around the devaluation of disabled lives. If these subjects are distressing, please read with care or seek support as needed. Additionally, this review was written by a deaf/disabled writer.

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Some films don’t just ask hard questions. They demand answers. Life After, directed by disabled filmmaker Reid Davenport, isn’t content with polite discussions or detached moral debates. It cuts right to the bone, forcing us to take in and evaluate the discomfort of what autonomy really means when your options are limited to indignity or death. For decades, able-bodied voices have been framing the conversation around assisted suicide, treating disability as an abstraction. Davenport reclaims the narrative, using the 1983 case of Elizabeth Bouvia as both a throughline and an investigative mystery. Bouvia, a young Californian woman with cerebral palsy, petitioned for the legal right to die, igniting a media firestorm. The world saw her as a symbol—a tragic figure seeking dignity in death. But Davenport asks: was her fight ever really about dying, or was it about a world that refused to let her truly live?

It’s a question that lingers in every single frame of Life After. The film doesn’t just revisit Bouvia’s case throughout. It expands the story to the present day, revealing how little has changed in the decades since. We see how disabled people continue to be denied agency, not by the lack of a legal right to die, but by the failure to provide the resources they need to live. Davenport brings us to Canada, where the country’s increasingly expansive Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) laws have created a chilling reality: disabled individuals who aren’t terminally ill are choosing assisted death because they can’t afford housing or care. It’s an unsettling contradiction. What does “choice” really mean when death is the most viable alternative to institutionalization and poverty?

One of the film’s most devastating moments comes from Michael Kaliszan, a disabled computer programmer in Ontario who considered MAID when his mother passed away and his home care hours were cut, leaving him facing life in a long-term care institution. “The government’s solution to my care need was to put me in a long-term care institution,” he says. “My life would be over. I would have no control over it. A trip to long-term care is basically a one-way trip.” It’s not hard to see why someone would choose death over being warehoused in a system that strips them of agency. But should that really be the only choice?

Davenport doesn’t just expose the cracks in the system (or massive openings as one person puts it). He lays bare an entire fault line. The film highlights how, in both the U.S. and Canada, disabled people disproportionately experience poverty, inadequate healthcare, and systemic neglect. Government assistance is often meager, forcing many to rely on family members or charity. And when those safety nets fail? “The healthcare system is going to tell you to kill yourself,” one activist bluntly states. “Because that’s the cheapest option.” The film brims with these gut-punch moments—statements that should be shocking but, in the context of the film, feel more like an inevitability.

The documentary isn’t solely outrage and despair. It’s also resilience, defiance, and community. Davenport speaks with disabled activists, including Ontario MPP Sarah Jama, who has fiercely opposed Canada’s MAID expansion. We meet Melissa Hickson, whose husband Michael was removed from life support against her wishes because doctors deemed his quality of life too low. But who decides what quality of life even means? These stories are enraging, but they’re also galvanizing. Life After exposes these injustices while still trying to imagine something better. What would a society look like that truly supported disabled lives? What if people had the tools to thrive instead of facing death?

Davenport himself is ever-present in the film, not just as a director but as a subject. His perspective is personal, urgent. This isn’t just an intellectual exercise for him—it’s survival. His presence reminds us that this debate isn’t about hypotheticals. It’s about real people navigating a world that often treats them as disposable. “Disabled people aren’t threatened by their bodies,” he says at one point. “They’re threatened by other people’s bodies.”

The documentary’s structure is meticulous, weaving archival footage, personal narratives, and investigative journalism with surgical precision. It refuses to be a passive history lesson. Instead, it unspools like a thriller, each new revelation exposing deeper, more insidious layers of ableism embedded in our institutions. The use of Bouvia’s case as a framing device is particularly compelling, as her story, once a media spectacle, now serves as a mirror to the present. And when we look into it, we see that the same fundamental questions remain unanswered.

Who gets to define what makes a life worth living? And perhaps the most important question of all: Why do we offer death before we offer real, tangible support? Life After demands that we rethink what true autonomy looks like, not just for the able-bodied, but for everyone. Because if the only choice we offer disabled people is death, then we’ve already failed them in life.

Life After had its world premiere at the Sundance 2025 Film Festival. Find more of our Sundance 2025 coverage here.