So real and so viscerally hard yet compelling enough to make you feel immersed in what you're seeing. "Extremis" touches one of those hard topics we tend to avoid and hardly ever think about until it happens to us or to someone we know and care about and that is the decision one must do in order to save a family member who's dying or to pull the plug and let them go because there's nothing more that can be done. A short documentary following medical doctors, families and people at the saddening final moments.
"Extremis" makes you think about those choices and gets all those different points of view of what to do, how to react and all the doubts that comes with it. The sick person can't do much to what's happening to them, the ones here all got tubes, equipment and such to help them breathe and continue to live in a deficient way. It all boils down to the talk the doctors must have with the family members, an extremely hard talk that follows with a more difficult decision.
We follow three or four cases, and people with better understanding in medicine will get it better the patients conditions since the film doesn't establish all that much, already cutting to what's going on and what's need to be done. In a way, it was very good they did that because all we need to know is that the patients will live though not in proper conditions and their relatives are the ones who can understand all the pain that goes through, all the caring they do and if they find appropriate to continue treatment or relieve their loved ones from more suffering. As someone who've always seen through the sick/dying one perspective, this is was truly something new to me, it made me reflect to how certain I could be in making an important decision concerning a person I loved, things that, unfortunately, they won't respond or say anything unless stated in previous talks - and that's the one we tend to avoid while going on living...cause death is for the later.
A commendable work though very sad to watch. What concerns me about the project is the thin line between what is exactly real and what is staged (if there is something like that, I mean, there were times I thought it was all acting). With a longer time, it'd be interesting for us in the audience to get everyone involved, backgrounds from families and the concerned doctors, just little things that'd make this a lot better. 8/10
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