Dick Johnson Is Dead review – a hilarious and moving meditation on death

Moving, funny, completely unique – Kirsten Johnson’s extraordinary Dick Johnson Is Dead is a brilliantly poignant and irreverent meditation on death and dying, fathers and daughters, and certainly one of the year’s most essential documentaries. The conceit is that Johnson, who made the excellent and personal film Cameraperson about her life spent behind a camera, has chosen to chronicle her father’s battle with dementia. Years ago her mother slowly succumbed to the disease, and in a terrible twist of fate, her father – the titular Richard “Dick” C. Johnson – has been diagnosed with the same condition.

But instead of waiting around for his inevitable death, she decides to confront it head on. Together father and daughter use the act of making a film as something akin to therapy. She will stage varying versions of his demise – some more elaborate than others (and with far more fake blood) in a bid to desensitise herself to the act. In one scene, Dick lies still in a coffin, playing dead, rehearsing for the big day. Does it make things easier? Eventually they both can't help but laugh at the absurdity of what they're doing, and you suppose that it does.

Johnson confesses right from the start that the film is an attempt at keeping her dad alive and waning off his disintegration. She can’t bear to think of losing him, and you understand why: Dick is such a likeable and gentle soul with a real lust for life and a natural, easy-going charm that endears him to everyone he meets. There’s a heartbreaking scene where he's told that he can no longer drive and we see the realisation forming in his eyes, the end of his independence – and several more just like it.

The death scenes are fun and inventive (and a surrealistically staged sequence of Dick in Heaven, dancing and reuniting with his wife, is glorious and powerful), but the real allure of the documentary is the father-daughter pairing and the honest way it broaches what is in reality an unthinkable situation. It perhaps even allows us to feel better about the idea of moving on from this world to another, unknowable one.

Dick Johnson Is Dead builds to a devastating finale – an elaborately designed funeral in which one of Dick’s friends seems to forget that it's all staged and delivers a heartbreaking speech in floods of tears as Dick watches on, living out one of the most common fantasies. It’s the sort of film that makes you realise how important it is to cherish our relationships while we still have the chance to acknowledge them. Death happens to everyone – when we’re gone, we’re gone. Time to send that text, or make that call.

Dick Johnson Is Dead is now streaming on Netflix and showing in select cinemas.