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Thus, Hakman perhaps inadvertently underscores the fact that the short films he produces are essentially narcissistic—not on the part of the people whose memories form the content of the films, but rather, on the part of those people who commission the films. Hakman interviews the families and friends left behind by his subjects so that he can shape the memories in a way that will serve the needs of those other people, and he deletes episodes of, say, adultery and spousal abuse as a matter of course. The end result is that each "re-memory" service is ultimately not so much a tribute to the person who died, but a deceptively soothing tribute to the people who attend the ceremony, where each person can persuade himself or herself that the loved one whose memory they are ostensibly there to celebrate saw all those people in the best light possible.

It brings to mind a remark that C. S. Lewis made in A Grief Observed, the journal in which he recorded his thoughts after his wife Joy died. In there, he expressed his own distress over the fact that the real Joy was no longer there to prevent herself from becoming a figment of Lewis's imagination. "The rough, sharp, cleansing tang of her otherness is gone," wrote Lewis. "What pitiable cant to say, 'She will live forever in my memory!' Live? That is exactly what she won't do. You might as well think like the old Egyptians that you can keep the dead by embalming them." And embalming, of a sort, is what Hakman does.

Fletcher (James Caviezel) is the leader of an organization that objects to 'cutting'

Like a lot of futuristic films, swallowing the film's premise requires the viewer to overlook a few plot holes—if cutters are licensed, as they must certainly be, then it seems, at one crucial point in the story, that applicants for the job are not screened as thoroughly as they ought to be—but the moral issues it raises are thought-provoking indeed. And the film has the timeless, natural look of the better low-budget sci-fi flicks; instead of souped-up digital backdrops and sleek metallic props, the film gives us old-fashioned cars, majestic British Columbian forests and laptops with varnished, wooden keyboards. And if the script seems a bit thin in places, or if the three lead actors all seem to have rather limited dramatic range, the film compensates with inspired moments such as the scene in which Hakman shows Delila some of his "outtakes"—clips in which the memory implants recorded not what the subjects' eyes happened to see, but what they saw with their minds.

Most significantly, the film underscores the fact that the meaning of our lives ultimately comes from somewhere outside of ourselves. One cutter remarks that people in her line of work have to make "story decisions" when sifting through memories, and the film ends on a somewhat chilling note, suggesting that our lives may be squeezed into stories that suit the agendas of others—and not the sort of stories that we would have preferred. But of course, we already have to live with these sorts of dilemmas, whenever we discuss the sinners, saints and others who have lived before us; and in a sense, an even bigger version of this process awaits all of us after we die. It is in God's perfect and loving memory that our lives will ultimately find their narrative shape. He, in the end, is the one with final cut.

Talk About It

1. Are we obliged to remember only the best things about people? What about the not-so-good things? Does it make a difference if the person is alive or dead when we come back to these memories or share them with other people?
   
   
2. One of Hakman's subjects is seen as a baby, a child, and an adult; he is a fairly typical boy in the early scenes, but he turns out to be an abusive adult. How do these different parts of a person's life fit together? Should they be kept separate? What if the person's life story had stopped at an earlier point? Which part of a person's life is the "real" him?
   
   

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