Filmmaker Kirsten Johnson’s original Netflix documentary Dick Johnson Is Dead (2020) is simultaneously one of the funniest and saddest films in recent memory. When her father, C. Richard “Dick” Johnson, was diagnosed with dementia in 2017, Kirsten—whose mother had already died of Alzheimer’s disease—approached her dad with a singularly oddball idea.
In order to help cope with the idea of his inevitable death, Kirsten would film numerous fictional sequences of her father dying—often in gruesome, macabre ways that would end with Dick miraculously resurrected back to life. A two-by-four to the face, an air conditioning unit falling outside a high window, a heart attack (a reenactment of a previous actual heart attack)—Dick Johnson dies many deaths over the course of this film.
What makes the documentary far more than a one-note effort, however, is the incredible loving bond between father and daughter as both deal with the continually accelerating effects of dementia, poignantly captured at one point in a Halloween-themed haunted house fantasy sequence in which Dick becomes confused and frightened in real life, bringing the scene to a halt. As fiction and nonfiction intertwine, the tone oscillates between light and dark, especially after Dick’s condition advances and Kirsten must relocate him to her own apartment for his own safety.
Dick Johnson Is Dead serves up a bizarre hybrid of reality and whimsy, with incredible scenes including a fabulously decorated imagining of Dick in Heaven, and a staged funeral in which Dick’s real friends and acquaintances come to pay tribute to the man (who watches, deeply moved, from the sidelines).
Ultimately, this film—which will resonate with anyone who has lost relatives to dementia—is as much a celebration of life as it is an acknowledgment of that one non-negotiable fact of the human condition.
Presented with a new 2K digital transfer, extras include an audio commentary featuring Johnson, co-writer and editor Nels Bangerter, and documentary sound recordist Judy Karp; a conversation among Johnson and her fellow producers Katy Chevigny and Marilyn Ness and coproducer Maureen A. Ryan; an interview with sound designer Pete Horner; a program featuring Johnson in conversation with fellow filmmakers about redefining what a documentary can be; and a leaflet with an essay by author So Mayer.
Highly recommended for public library film collections specializing in documentaries and the Criterion Collection or medical professors teaching about Alzheimer’s disease.