Near death: three survivors and the doctors who see consciousness going on

In January 2003, Vinney Tolman, then an amateur bodybuilder in his early twenties, took a supplement bought online, fell ill at a fast-food restaurant and collapsed in the bathroom, choking on his own vomit. He says he watched the rescue from above, including the moment a rookie paramedic, with the body already zipped into a bag in the ambulance, defied his colleagues and tried to revive him with the defibrillator.

Stories like this are the material independent filmmaker Anthony Chene, who funds his films through viewer donations, uses to build a nearly two-hour documentary on the near-death experience (NDE): the set of sensations some people describe after coming close to dying, such as leaving the body, passing through a tunnel and reviewing their own life.

Three survivors

Besides Tolman, two women speak. Penny Wittbrodt, an intensive care nurse, went into anaphylactic shock, was placed in an induced coma and says she met her grandmother, who had died decades earlier. Barbara Bartolome went into cardiac arrest in 1987 in Santa Barbara, California, after an error during a contrast scan of her spine; she describes her resuscitation as seen from the ceiling and recalls that the neurosurgeon left the room when she tried to report what she had seen. All three speak of a love hard to put into words, of a life review seen through other people's eyes and of choosing to come back.

The convinced doctors

Three physicians set the film's tone. Psychiatrist Raymond Moody, author of Life After Life (1975), the book that made the subject popular. Neurosurgeon Eben Alexander, who taught at Harvard and spent seven days in a coma with meningitis in 2008. And Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel, who compares the brain to an internet receiver: the device picks up consciousness but does not make it. All of them have written books on the subject.

Moody is the most cautious. He says logic does not allow the conclusion that there is life after death, yet admits he came to believe in it: "It's not like a conclusion. It's just that I've run out of ways to think my way out of it."

What is left out

Van Lommel's research is real: in a study published in The Lancet in 2001, 62 of 344 patients resuscitated after cardiac arrest (18%) reported an NDE, and its frequency did not depend on how long the arrest lasted or on medication. But there is no scientific consensus on what causes the experience. The film mentions oxygen deprivation and drug effects only so the interviewees can dismiss them, without hearing from any researcher who defends those explanations. The times spent clinically dead come from the memories of those who lived them, and the final section, with its prophecy of a "great separation" of humanity, is Tolman's personal belief.

Why watch

For the strength of the testimonies and for what the film shows after the return: years of loneliness, doctors who would not listen and families unsettled by the change. It is an honest portrait of people who lived through an NDE, even if it is not a debate.