Faces of Death 2023

In a frame narrated by Christopher Lee (archive footage), pathologist Francis B. Gröss introduces his lifelong fascination with the transitional moments between life and death. His perspective comes from a surgeon’s past—one that has desensitized him to grisly scenes—yet his goal is to catalog and understand the many “faces of death” through a careful, almost clinical curation of footage.

The journey opens with stark images of animal deaths, which Gröss interprets as a violent reply from a creature that has endured human cruelty. He then moves to human violence, presenting recordings of assassinations and the blunt truth that some killers act from greed rather than ideology. An interview with assassin François Jordan reveals a disturbing view: he kills strictly for payment, and if a mission ever held real sentiment, he would refuse it with respect. The narrative then introduces a different killer—one who takes lives without any clear motive. A gunfight erupts as a SWAT team pursues an armed murderer; tear gas is used, and the house is stormed after the killer’s family has been fatally stabbed, leaving Gröss to wonder whether social forces shaped such violence.

Gröss then contrasts the actions of courtrooms with the cold precision of execution, watching Larry DeSilva die in the electric chair and asking whether “two wrongs make a right.” The journey continues in the Los Angeles County coroner’s office, where Dr. Thomas Noguchi embalms multiple corpses after autopsies. The images are stark: a bloated drowned woman and a decapitated man whose skin is peeled away for study. Gröss asks Noguchi about the meaning of embalming after death, receiving the stark reply that “life is purely a transitory state.”

One sequence navigates the controversial topic of cryopreservation. A man named Samuel Berkowitz is maintained in a cryogenic process, his bodily fluids replaced with a low-freezing-point liquid and stored for possible revival in the future. The film’s exploration of preservation shifts to a broader meditation on suicide, including footage of a woman leaping from a building. Gröss admits that this is “a face of death he wishes never to face again.”

The documentary then broadens to the scars of history: wartime atrocities and the Holocaust. Footage depicts German forces in a desperate last stand, followed by the destruction of Nazism and the symbols of tyranny obliterated in battle. Gröss muses on the mind of a leader who lost control, saying Hitler “lost control not only of his army but of his mind.”

Environmental and existential decay follow: scenes of animals harmed by litter and pollution, and images of sick children in impoverished regions. Nature is examined through a search party retrieving a body from a cave, a man found drowned on a beach, and a bear attack on irresponsible campers. The film also delves into disturbing subcultures, showing a venomous snake cult in Louisville that harms its handler and a cannibalistic cult that consumes a cadaver stolen from a morgue before engaging in an orgy.

A string of tragic accidents culminates in a parachute jump gone wrong. Gröss disputes the notion that the death comes quickly and painlessly, noting that the victim would have remained conscious for the fall. The sequence reaches a stark climax with PSA Flight 182, presenting photographs, air-traffic control audio, and the wreckage of homes, with the neighborhood described as smelling of “rotting bodies and jet fuel,” and a mutilated torso-and-hand corpse described as “the worst face of death.”

Turning toward the supernatural, Gröss examines whether forces beyond the physical realm influence death. He encounters architect Joseph Binder, whose wife and son died under sorrowful circumstances, and Binder conveys a belief that his family lingers as ghosts in his home. Guided by parapsychologists, the team records footprints and apparitions; a medium connects Binder with the impression of his deceased relatives, seemingly validating the possibility of life after death.

From these investigations, Gröss concludes a hopeful, if enigmatic, philosophy: “when we die, it isn’t the end,” and that the soul in each person remains a traveler forever. He ponders whether death marks “the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end,” leaving the audience to interpret the footage with their own reflections. The film closes on a quiet, peaceful note—soft music accompanies images of a newborn baby and the intimate happiness of a mother and child—closing the loop on a documentary that traverses fear, awe, and the mystery that clings to every life.