Extremis Review

The very start of the film is a bit heartbreaking and then the clips following it overwhelmed me. Even though it is a short film, the topic Extremis discusses is a heavy one. Death is not easy for people to accept or face and watching multiple families deal with it brought more awareness to that difficult situation. It is one thing knowing that a hospital deals with death on a daily basis and another thing to see how tragic and painful those moments truly are. The ethics involved in making life-or-death decisions are heavily prevalent in the film. Watching the doctors discuss what to do for the patient when the patient couldn’t make that decision felt wrong, yet necessary. Watching the families make that decision was even tougher to see because you could see how much that decision weighed on their shoulders. While watching, I was constantly thinking about how difficult it would be to produce a film like this. It almost seemed like I was intruding on these families’ precious moments, but it does seem like the producers did know when not to film. I did also notice a few shaky camera scenes, but it did not take anything away from the story. Watching this during a pandemic was hard, but very eye-opening.