Dick Johnson Is Dead (2020)
There is a particular kind of documentary that uses the camera not as an observational tool but as an act of love, almost of conjuration. Dick Johnson Is Dead, released in 2020 and distributed through Netflix after its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, belongs firmly to that tradition. Kirsten Johnson, already well-regarded for her earlier autobiographical documentary Cameraperson (2016), turns the lens here on her own father, Dick Johnson, a retired psychiatrist in his mid-eighties who is beginning to show the signs of dementia. Rather than making a straightforward portrait of decline, Johnson and her father conspire in something stranger and more tender: a series of staged deaths, mock funerals, and visions of the afterlife, all built around the man himself, fully in on the joke and very much alive. The film sits somewhere between home movie, experimental essay, and grief rehearsal, and it is not quite like anything else in recent documentary filmmaking.
Johnson co-wrote the film with her editor Nels Bangerter, and the two of them share a credit that reflects how tightly the shape of the piece is tied to its construction. Bangerter's editing is central to how the film holds together: the cutting moves between the staged set-pieces and the quieter, unplanned footage with a rhythm that feels both deliberate and spontaneous, never letting either register overwhelm the other. The cinematography is shared between Johnson herself and John Wakayama Carey, and the images they produce have a domestic warmth to them, close and handheld, the kind of footage that feels like it was made by someone who genuinely loves its subject rather than someone observing from a professional distance. The score, by Hitomi Shimizu, sits lightly beneath the film, gentle and a little melancholy without ever pushing the audience toward an emotion the material has not already earned. If you are interested in how documentary filmmakers have used personal and intimate cinematography to approach difficult subjects, I also covered Of Time and the City, Terence Davies's essay film about memory and loss, which shares some of that same quality of a filmmaker reckoning with something irretrievable.
The cast, if that word applies in a documentary context, is essentially the Johnson family. Richard Johnson, Dick himself, is the quiet heart of the whole enterprise: funny, dignified, and apparently game for anything his daughter puts him through. There is real screen presence in the man, an ease in front of the camera that makes the more unguarded moments, when the conversation turns to what is genuinely coming, feel all the more affecting. Kirsten Johnson appears on screen too, which is a choice that matters: this is not a film in which the director hides behind the apparatus. Isla Sierck, Jed Sierck, and Felix Torres round out the principal figures on screen, giving the film a wider sense of family and community surrounding its central relationship. The film was produced through Big Mouth Productions, and its modest scale is part of its character, this is not a polished but unremarkable prestige production, it is something made close and careful, at roughly arm's length from its subject. For a companion piece on documentary filmmaking that leans into the personal and the constructed, see also The White Diamond, Werner Herzog's documentary that blurs the line between observation and invention in ways that rhyme, however obliquely, with Johnson's approach here.
I lost my dad six years ago, and the only moving image of him I have left is a grainy VHS from Christmas 1994. He was an old-school sort, never one for cameras, so that tape is more or less all there is. I mention it because it is why Dick Johnson Is Dead found me the way it did, right in the chest, before I had even properly settled into it.
The film is the documentary-maker Kirsten Johnson's attempt to brace herself for losing her own father, Dick, a warm, funny retired psychiatrist beginning to slip into dementia. Rather than simply film his decline, the two of them decide together to keep killing him off: staging elaborate, comic fake deaths, mocking up his funeral, even dreaming up his arrival in heaven.
On paper it sounds macabre, maybe even tasteless. In practice it is the opposite, a daughter using the only tools she has, a camera and a sense of humour, to hold her father close and rehearse a grief she cannot avoid.
And it works, in its own strange and lovely way. It is very funny, often, and then it turns on a sixpence and breaks your heart; I will not pretend it did not have me in tears more than once. The staged silliness is disarming, but it is the plainer, unguarded moments that land hardest, the two of them simply sitting and talking about what is coming and what they will both lose. Those scenes are almost unbearable, in the best possible way.
It is an odd, imperfect film, and its unusual shape will not click for everyone. But it is attempting something very hard, looking mortality dead in the eye and choosing warmth and play over despair, and it manages it beautifully. Three and a half stars, a touching, funny, deeply moving film about a father and a daughter, and one that meant more to me than most, for reasons of my own.
Dick Johnson Is Dead is the kind of film that arrives quietly and stays longer than expected. It makes a case, not through argument but through feeling, that looking at death with humour and imagination is not evasion but a form of courage, and that documentary filmmaking can be an act of love as much as record. It will not suit every taste: its shape is loose, its logic more emotional than structural, and viewers who prefer their documentaries to keep a certain clinical distance may find its warmth hard to settle into. But for those who meet it on its own terms, it offers something that most films, documentary or otherwise, do not quite manage. I also reviewed Marty, a very different film and a much earlier one, but one that shares this film's insistence that ordinary, unglamorous human feeling is more than enough to build something lasting from. Dick Johnson Is Dead is, in its odd and imperfect way, proof of the same thing. Not bad going for a film about a man who keeps getting killed and keeps on showing up.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2020 | Watched: 2026-09-22
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Dick Johnson Is Dead (2020) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon US
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