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21 out of 23 people found the following review useful:
The cold, hard truth, 16 March 2005
10/10
Author: xakarava from United States

I recently saw "A Certain Kind of Death" on Sundance and it literally blew my mind away. It was captivating because this documentary actually makes one appreciate life a lot more.

"A Certain Kind of Death" explores as to what happens to the unclaimed dead (the deceased with no RECORDED next of kin)when their corpses are now the care of the government (which in this case is LA county). Maybe many people have an idea what happens to the deceased John and Jane Does' of the world but this explores the nitty, gritty details as to what happens. I will not spoil it here or go into too much detail, but there are people whose job it is to take care of the unclaimed dead corpses and to them it's business as usual, but the images from their jobs will stick with you and I have, at least, learned to appreciate my family and most importantly my life after watching this story (in other words, don't take everyday life for granted for you never know....) This isn't a cheery documentary. It does make you think and feel. Some viewers have complained that the people in the film aren't passionate about their jobs. Well, since when processing corpses on a daily basis (mind you, some of these corpses are in pretty AWFUL shape) invokes passion??? This is what essentially happens when you die folks, there's no way around it. Some have pretty mahogany coffins with satin lining, others have 24k gold urns for their ashes, but their are many out there not so fortunate but in the end we all end up the same: ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

I highly recommend this film.

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18 out of 20 people found the following review useful:
Quiet, and Contemplative, 21 June 2004
10/10
Author: catiecatie from oakland, ca

This is one of the best docs I have seen! Quiet and contemplative, it moves at a 'real time' pace. Highly informative, you feel as if you are in the movie via staring at the clock, or people's desks as they go about the long, drawn out process closing the deceased's affairs. That is what you want in a doc, right? This will also inspire you to get it together regarding paperwork, funeral arrangements etc. so the city/county/state doesn't have to. (It was creepy watching strangers go through a person's effects.) This movie will inspire me at least to do my dishes everyday, because you never know, it may be my last!

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15 out of 15 people found the following review useful:
Off-beat subject handled in a fitting manner (with "spoiler"), 25 May 2004
Author: (davebeedon@comcast.net) from Renton, Washington, USA

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

This film, about an off-beat subject, captivated me from start to finish. It describes what the County of Los Angeles does with corpses and personal property when a person dies without any next of kin. The filming style is strictly business with no frills, which lets the viewer concentrate on the often sad subject matter. Employees in office settings talk to the film crew in a natural, no-nonsense manner about the work they do. Some scenes have no dialog or narration and feel just right that way. Nothing seemed staged.

Before seeing this film, I had never thought about the subject matter of this film---who has? That's why it appealed to me: it exposes an aspect of society that lurks beneath the surface of our awareness. I love to learn about such obscure activities.

The amount of effort put into the county's process was amazing and showed concern for people who are 'all alone at the end.' I saw the employees as performers of an honorable task in the name of people who had no one else to speak for them. Their work probably goes unnoticed by the majority of the public and is therefore thankless. I appreciated that the filmmakers did not try to make the subject more exciting than it was or to gloss over ugly aspects of the process.

It's definitely not for the faint of heart. It shows corpses---sometimes naked---lying on floors, and one of them is obviously decomposing. Plastic-wrapped bodies are casually handled in various stages of the process. Crematory employees break up, then grind, the bones that are left over after fire has done its work. There are plenty of disturbing images.

One scene haunted me: the county's property people are cleaning out the apartment or house of someone who recently died. The goods will be held for a while, then auctioned off to pay debts and county costs. After the last picture has been removed from the living room wall, all that remains on the wall is the set of picture hangers and the dirty outlines where the pictures used to be. For me that scene said, 'The meaning of Life X has been lost.'

The slow pace of the credits at the end seemed a fitting tribute to the people---living and dead---who had been documented. A film definitely worth watching. My thanks to the people who made it and to the Sundance Channel for exposing me to it.

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11 out of 11 people found the following review useful:
Excellent Documentary, 22 July 2006
8/10
Author: slake09 from Silver Lake, Ohio, USA

One of the better documentaries I've seen, A Certain Kind of Death explores what happens to people whose bodies go unclaimed by relatives. Although it's a grisly subject the film makers were able to make it an interesting and very watchable experience.

Dead bodies in various stages of decomposition are seen, but not played for shock factor. Instead, you learn a little about each person, both what they were before death and what will happen to them afterward. They are followed from the discovery of the body to the final disposition of the remains, and each step in between.

The LA County Coroner's Office figures prominently, and they are shown to be a dedicated and professional group with respect for the dead and their property. I was surprised to find this documentary to be so watchable, it has a good flow and answers most if not all questions.

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9 out of 9 people found the following review useful:
Sometimes Unsettling, Rarely Boring, 16 August 2006
8/10
Author: jonathon_naylor from Manitoba, Canada

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

Sometimes unsettling but rarely boring documentary answers an interesting, unexplored question: What happens to people who die with no next of kin? Producers followed the men and women in Los Angeles who are handed the task of trying to track down somebody -- anybody -- with relation to the deceased. Hundreds of unrelatable corpses slowly move through a process of storage, cremation and ultimately mass burial.

Obviously such a topic deserves to be handled with sensitivity, and "A Certain Kind of Death" does just that. While the film never holds back -- we see our share of slowly-decaying bodies and red-hot roasting skulls -- but none if it ever comes off as exploitive. This is a mature film made by serious people. If you think the premise appeals to you, so will the film.

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11 out of 15 people found the following review useful:
beautiful and somewhat horrific, 17 January 2005
10/10
Author: sswiller-1 from New York, United States

I love this film. The director's unblinking eye captures something extraordinary and mundane. You see the process of laying to rest the John and Jane Does of Los Angeles. Some parts are extremely graphic, showing the bodies of deceased people (vagrants really) as well as the practical and unsettlingly methodical protocol used to handle and interr the remains. Part of me sees this film as a sweet elegy about death and impermanence. The other part of me sees a film about fascism and genocide because all of the living characters are lower-middle class bureaucrats who exist in a bureaucratic fog. Whether they shuffle papers or crush incinerated bone fragments, there is an alarming detachment masked behind a thin layer of civic obligation. This is not like the docs on CourtTV; this is a thoughtful, well-shot production.

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6 out of 7 people found the following review useful:
Outstanding documentary in the Errol Morris vein, 5 September 2008
10/10
Author: Cosmoeticadotcom (cosmoetica@gmail.com) from United States

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

Where would contemporary documentaries be without the Michael Moore style of self-promotional agitprop, or without PBS's Burns Brothers' solemnly historical talking heads and recitations form of docudrama? Well, back to straightforward journalistic techniques, of the sort employed in the outstanding 70 minute long 2003 documentary from directors Grover Babcock and Blue Hadaegh, A Certain Kind Of Death. And no, this is not the exploitative pseudo-documentary style that was pioneered in camp classics like Faces Of Death nor Mondo Cane. Instead, the directors hew to the early style of Errol Morris, albeit even more starkly. Their technique- of emotional distancing, by having employees of the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office simply tell how they do their jobs when dealing with kinless decedents, rather than telling how they feel, gives the audience an unbiased 'in' to the rather rote way municipalities deal with the hundreds of annual unclaimed dead- what used to be referred to as 'going to potter's field.'

The film follows the deaths of three single white middle-aged men in 2001….The inurement and occasional humor displayed by the people who clean up after the dead bodies, sift through their belongings, research their lives, and try to find next of kin, is to be expected in government work (as I was once a civil servant), where the roteness of civil servitude even less interesting than this often holds sway, but especially when one has to deal with about 2000 such cases a year. And when we see the bodies- naked, emotionless, with welts, bruises, or partly rotted and decomposed portions of their forms (these stiffs are called 'decomps' in the parlance), inurement seems a wholly reasonable approach one should take to such tasks, such as slinging the dead by their four limbs, like a shot deer (something I recall watching my own dead dad's body enduring)….

The utter lack of staginess and pretense makes this film invaluable, as both a research tool and a warning to those who have disconnected from life. The soundlessness as people do their jobs simply listing the contents of a life that is done is sad, yet not depressing. The only intervention of music in the film comes in a brief moment as an ice cream truck passes by during filming, and at the credit sequence that ends the film. Greensleeves is played, and its musical singularity only multiplies its emotional impact, especially since the film ends near Christmas, signifying it connects to the Resurrection of Christ sung of in the Greensleeves inspired song What Child Is This?….

Yet, A Certain Kind Of Death's value and filmic greatness comes also from restraint- in not going on too long, in not manipulating reality nor the viewer's emotions, and by letting images sink in. Often something interesting or shocking is followed by a several second long 'black screen.' For all the countless deaths shown on film in the century plus the medium has existed, none have ever been this realistic, for these deaths are real. Real people die, and are forgotten. The end. Or not, due to this film….

This film is an invaluable document of not only a certain time in American history, but these certain people's lives and deaths, as well as those of the county workers who bandy about terms like dispo, decomp, drayage, and harvesting. That it also comments mightily on the living- such as the fact that all the most menial tasks of destroying and burying remains falls to black and Latino workers, makes this film even more valuable. It's no wonder this film won a Special Jury Prize at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival. It is gritty yet poetic, and reinforced by its blackout moments, it forces cogitation upon the viewer, then, upon resumption, shuttles them along. The irony implicit in the film is that the very thing that made these three dead men perfect subjects for the film- their utter disconnect from the rest of humanity, and the genericness of their lives and deaths, is the very thing that assures that they will always be known, at least by documentary film buffs. That this says more of the living than the dead is precisely why A Certain Kind Of Death, with its Joe Friday 'Just the facts!' approach is a great documentary, and should be viewed and appreciated for many years to come.

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4 out of 4 people found the following review useful:
Being and Nothingness, 31 January 2008
10/10
Author: groggo from Toronto, Ontario, Canada

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

Filmmakers Grover Babcock and Blue Hadaegh have given us a brilliant, gritty, no-frills examination of a subject that not many people think about, or want to think about: what happens to people who die and nobody steps forward to claim their bodies?

'A Certain Kind of Death' follows several of these 'John Doe' cases. We get personal 'glances' at these profoundly alienated people, who apparently lived their lives feeling alone and detached from society. It is the existential literature of Sartre or Camus translated into real life.

There are no gimmicks in this film, very little music, and most of it is done in cinema verite style. We see investigators from L.A. County methodically plowing through the effects of the deceased, and we see them trying hard to find people who care enough to come forward and make funeral arrangements.

In one striking and disturbing scene, we see the contents of a decedent's apartment totally removed. The camera lingers on the emptiness, with outlines of where wall hangings used to be. All that remains of the dead man are outlines -- he is already being processed for cremation. We then see the apartment's contents being auctioned off to the highest bidder. The man remains a commodity long after his death.

Babcock and Hadaegh deserve high praise for an offbeat and important film about a story that needed to be told. Social disconnection and alienation are major problems, particularly in large urban areas, yet we hear little about them in our absurd pop-cultured world. In L.A. County alone, there are apparently about 1,600 unclaimed bodies every year. Not everyone is surrounded by caring families, not everyone knows the good life.

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2 out of 2 people found the following review useful:
moving but brutal, 10 August 2008
9/10
Author: kfugrrl from United States

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

I found this to be an extremely moving film. It's an unflinching and honest look at the work that is involved when a john doe is found. I admired the lengths that these county workers had to take to give each person a name and to handle their affairs, if any were left. I felt that the workers did a very good job. i imagine that a certain amount of stoicism would be necessary to be able to see complete strangers at their most vulnerable. the film is very visceral and graphic in how we see the journey of each body from beginning to end and it was shocking to see how many bodies passed through the cremation process, and not just the three that the filmmakers followed. i was very sad to see the belongings of Mr. tanner sitting anonymously at the auction. there was a desire to be able to speak up and give the belongings a name and a history from where they came. i admired the way that they took the time to shred all of his checking account papers, to give him some protection, even after death. it's a very very admirable film and i would highly recommend it to anyone who wonders what happens when someone dies alone.

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2 out of 2 people found the following review useful:
A matter-of-fact documentary about death, 4 April 2008
10/10
Author: robtakendall from United States

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

I really identified with this documentary because my father died in L.A. County and was cremated. Maybe I have a morbid sense of humor (or maybe I'm just a realist), but when I saw the scene with the industrial blender I was a little surprised at first, then I thought, "Oh my God, Daddy was in a blender!?" and laughed (knowing my father, he also would have thought that amusing - and you'll have to see the movie to know what I'm talking about).

There's an old saying...there are two things you always do alone: you are born alone, and you die alone. This movie focuses on people who really do die alone, and the Los Angeles County Coroner's office staff who have the unfortunate job of disposing of the decedents and their respective property. There seems to be a lot of discussion on this board about the apartment that had to be cleaned out after one man died....the process, at least to me, was interesting to watch. The staff member was very thorough, had a checklist, and made sure that there was a witness (the landlord) to the entire procedure.

The directors did a fine job on this documentary; it was an educational eye-opener. It showed the reality of death, and the professionalism and respect showed by the coroner's staff. I do hope the makers of this documentary will do another one soon.

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