Edge of Life (2025) - Review
In Edge of Life, Lynette Wallworth stands just outside the frame, her silence becoming a kind of faith. The film follows Drs. Marg Ross and Justin Dwyer, Australian palliative-care specialists who journey to Brazil to meet Muka, a shaman whose practice with ayahuasca offers not so much a cure as a confrontation. What Wallworth captures is less a documentary about death than a séance for the living—an attempt to restore the communal and the sacred to medicine’s antiseptic corridors.
Muka is the film’s axis, his presence as electric as it is ineffable. Through him, we watch physicians and patients shed the decorum of science and face the enormity of loss, not as data but as experience. When a widower undertakes the same ritual that once steadied his dying wife, grief becomes less an ailment than a condition of belonging. Wallworth’s camera doesn’t interpret; it bears witness. Her restraint allows the film to breathe, to let transcendence unfold in the tremor of a hand, the quiet after a chant, the calm that follows a revelation.
In a culture that medicalises every threshold, Edge of Life insists that dying is not an aberration but a rhythm within life’s score. Watching it, one feels both devastated and soothed—as if the film itself were guiding us through the ceremony, urging us to look directly at what we most avoid. The great lie, it suggests, is that we ever “get over” death. The truth, tender and terrifying, is that we live beside it.
