No one has managed to escape death, at least for now, but the question is what the future, the development of technology and artificial intelligence bring us. In the near future, the debut feature film of the Irishman Benjamin Cleary, winner of the Oscar for Best Short Film (Stutterer) back in 2015, which finally decided to make a feature film. And “Swan Song” was an extremely complex and profound combination of SF and drama that opens up some very interesting questions. The film is also interesting from a philosophical and ethical point of view because it deals with the topic of mortality and some futuristic attempts to deceive death. We know from literature, and later film, that there were numerous attempts to deceive death (let’s just remember Bergman’s masterpiece “The Seventh Seal”), but death still came for the one it was intended for.
This time she aimed at Cameron (Mahershala Ali), a family man in his late thirties or early forties. Of course, the news that someone is in the terminal stage of the disease and that he has a short time left is certainly quite shocking and unthinkable to anyone who has not encountered such a diagnosis. More than death itself, Cameron’s heart seems to break that he will be left alone by the family he loves immensely, his wife Poppie (Naomie Harris) and son, but it will prove that there is a solution that could save his loved ones from pain. As the plot of the film is set in the near future, there is an experimental clinic that has developed the technology of producing completely identical clones.
So, a man who is terminally ill, signs up there, makes a clone in the clinic that then picks up all the data from the user’s brain and consciousness and when the real man and his clone are calibrated, the replicant is ready to enter the man’s life exactly where he left off. This technology will be like a heart transplant in a few years, assures Cameron, the head of the clinic (Glenn Close), while he is still hesitant to agree to such a thing or reconcile with fate in a good, old way and tell his wife and son what is happening. The focus of this finely thought-out and interesting film is the existentialist dilemma of what is the best solution for Cameron’s family, is it honesty and recognition of what is happening? Or yet cheating on their double that they will never realize is not the original? Or maybe he will.
Through flashbacks, we also learn the background story of Cameron and Poppie, and in this way Cleary seems to be trying to further explain to us what it is that a person loses from death. We see right at the beginning how they met, what their life together looked like, what traumas they went through, mostly everything that people go through and experience and everything that makes them human. It’s a family that has faced loss before and that’s actually the main reason why Cameron thinks the best solution would be not to afford his wife another loss because he’s aware of what could happen and how his death could affect him. But at the same time as he tries to protect and save his wife and son from pain, he develops fear, anger, discomfort and even envy that someone else will soon take his place, regardless of the fact that he is his complete double.
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