Netflix puts a lot of content our way, and we are able to categorise most of it by genre: sitcoms, romance, drama, stand-up comedy, tragedies, documentary…. But Surviving Death, which looks at life after death in normal and paranormal ways, is a new style of series altogether and hard to be labelled. There is grief and ghosts, reincarnation and reconnections, mediums and messages from beyond. You gasp, but you also get it.
Post-COVID, no one is on sure ground anymore. The week this series dropped, a flight crashed in Indonesia. There is an impending sense of doom in the air. Certainties have turned fatal, someone or the other we know has succumbed to complications from this virus. Mankind is pushed to the brink, not just about ways to process the terrible terminal truth of the moment, but to put in perspective religious and personal beliefs.
As expected, there is a lot of mention about science in the series, as if to ward off criticism of being just another goose-bumpy viewing. The person who technically ‘died’ for half an hour and speaks about her near-death experience is a doctor, for instance. But as viewers we come with our own baggage in this department. When the bereaved mention seeing butterflies or birds as signs from the departed, we want it to be true for their sake. The stark grief on their faces demands a consoling.
The spooky element has been kept to the minimum – there are haunted houses, but the ghouls are friendly – and psychics are routinely checked for fraud. Mediums take us through the paces even as doubting Thomases confide in us their foolproof methods of investigations.
While putting together Boo, a collection of scary tales for Penguin, most of the contributors depicted the dead returning as petulant, wise, confused or quirky beings. Very rarely were the ghosts murderous or violent. The afterlife, pretty much like life in the here and now, is peopled with moody, capricious folks it would seem. This normalisation of the supernatural goes a long way in calming us when we have to walk past graveyards at night.
Surviving Death, based on a book by Leslie Kean, addresses some vital misconceptions; there is no stigma to how a death occurs. Suicide, drug overdose, illness or accident… It doesn’t matter how a human life is snuffed out, the survivors have to cope with the sudden absence of a whole person. An interest in what happens after death is not just pedestrian curiosity but a quilt on a cold night. The bereaved need a sign to cling to. Sometimes they get it, sometimes they don’t.
It is only natural to miss and look for those who leave us without a word. Unsaid goodbyes ache forever. Where do they go, these people we loved madly? What do we do with all those memories, all that love? Surviving Death explores myriad venues and ends up handing out hope. Any playing to the gallery is survived by the visceral message of continuum. One goes in fearful and comes away hopeful. Oh, to go on forever.
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