'Dick Johnson is Dead' has fun with death | movie review

In Netflix’s Dick Johnson is Dead, cameraperson Kirsten Johnson stages various enactments of her father’s death as he suffers from dementia.

Dick Johnson is Dead is a fascinating and extremely personal exercise in experimental documentary filmmaking that will have you laughing until you cry and crying until you laugh. It is a film unabashedly about death—and life.

▶︎ Streaming on Netflix

There are a few constants in life. Maybe it’s a person. Maybe it’s something that has become a part of your story. Maybe it’s a part of your body. For C. Richard Johnson, they’re his wife and then his daughter, a chocolate cake and a chair, and his deformed toes. This is not a joke. In actuality, Dick Johnson is Dead the filmis a bit of a joke seeing as the titular Dick is very much alive. His daughter Kirsten Johnson, a documentary cameraperson as she puts it—she even made a film called Cameraperson (streaming on The Criterion Channel or you can rent it on Amazon), has tasked herself with filming dramatizations of her father’s death.

Why? Dick, a recently retired clinical psychologist, is suffering from dementia—the same illness that took his wife seven years prior, which Kirsten captured some of in Cameraperson. Instead of waiting for the inevitable, she films various enactments of his death, which at the start he enthusiastically participates in. The scenarios range from bleeding out from a neck wound to every New Yorker’s fear of being struck by a falling air conditioning unit. She even stages his funeral and entrance into heaven, which is full of glitter, modern dance, and Jesus performing a miracle. And as dark as the humor is, I found myself laughing at all of it—until it started to make me cry.

What’s fascinating about both Cameraperson, which was stitched together from excess footage from her various projects across the globe, and Dick Johnson is Dead is that the filmmaking bleeds on the edge. You see what went into getting the shot—casting stunt people, the special effects. There are moments when Kirsten is discussing her motivations for the film with her father and asking him about certain scenarios. At one point, the voiceover we’re hearing cuts to her recording it her apartment closet. But this is all to say that the movie isn’t about these reenactments. Instead, it’s about what’s happening in between.

Both of them are still dealing with his wife’s passing, even if it was a decade ago. And the fact that he’s suffering from the same illness makes it all the harder because Kirsten knows what is coming. In one clip Dick heartbreakingly apologizes to her for it. The camera is on the floor and neither of them are in shot. We get those moments in passing. As I was watching the movie I got the sense that Kirsten was using it as a way to spend more time with her father and learn more about his life. I also got the sense that it was a sort of therapy for her. Ironic since Dick himself was a therapist—and a great one based on a scene later in the film.

I’m 26. My father just turned 60 and my mother is 57. I’m just now starting to feel the mortality of my parents, and Dick Johnson is Dead only made me feel it more. However, what it also did is motivate me to learn more about them. To spend more time with them. To capture them more. This movie isn’t the old cliché of being about life instead of death. It’s very much about death. It’s unabashedly about death. However, it’s about the alternating sensations of crying and laughing we feel when we confront it. Both are valid reactions from everyone involved, the person, their loved ones, and even those that only saw them in passing. Dick Johnson Is Dead is a love letter to life—a life that includes death.

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Hey! I’m Karl. You can find me on Twitter here. I’m also a Tomatometer-approved critic.

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Karl Delossantos

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Hey, I'm Karl, founder and film critic at Smash Cut. I started Smash Cut in 2014 to share my love of movies and give a perspective I haven't yet seen represented. I'm also an editor at The New York Times, a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, and a member of the Online Film Critics Society.