Once the world becomes perfect, humanity must manufacture its own hardships and trauma. This idea is at the heart of Can I Get a Witness?, Ann Marie Fleming’s quiet and thought-provoking sci-fi drama. The film imagines a future where humanity has supposedly solved its greatest challenges, including war, overpopulation, and climate change. All at an unbearable cost. Through stunning cinematography, restrained performances, and a hauntingly simple premise, the film explores themes of sacrifice, memory, and the quiet erosion of free will.
A Perfect Future
The film begins with what appears to be an ordinary morning as Ellie (played by the amazing Sandra Oh) cheerfully moves through her home and encourages her daughter Kiah (Keira Jang) to get ready for work. Outside, the world seems bright and productive. People ride bicycles and bake bread, and an instrumental version of the classic 1938 song “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire” plays in the background, evoking the sound of an old Victorian record player.
As Ellie’s day unfolds, it becomes clear that this is no ordinary morning. It is not a typical day for us in 2025, nor for the present that this family inhabits. First, their world exists without electricity and is shaped by a way of life that feels both old-fashioned and unfamiliar. When Daniel (Joel Oulette) arrives to take Kiah to her first day of work, the true weight of this world begins to reveal itself.
The film’s restrained performances significantly deepen its emotional impact. Despite not being the lead, Oh’s portrayal of Ellie adds significant depth to the narrative. It also captures the essence of a society where an unspoken deadline looms yet remains unacknowledged. Furthermore, her nuanced performance enriches the film’s exploration of a world grappling with the costs of its utopian ideals.
A Witness
Kiah is beginning her role as a Witness. This means she is tasked with observing and documenting the final moments of people who have reached the mandated age of fifty. In this world, death is not something to be feared or resisted. It is simply a duty. Kiah, like the rest of the younger generation, has been raised not to question the system but to ensure the process remains orderly. When she follows Daniel to a man’s home, she watches as he happily tends his garden. Daniel hands him a wooden box (the same box Ellie received earlier that morning). The man accepts it without hesitation because his fate is already decided.
Kiah’s role is to observe, not interfere. However, as she sketches the people she meets, something strange begins to happen. Her drawings, the only remaining record of the deceased in a world without photography, take on an imaginative surrealism that juxtaposes the stark realism of the film. Jang captures Kiah’s gradual awakening with subtlety, while Oulette’s Daniel provides an unsettling contrast. His easygoing nature makes the world’s rules feel even more disturbing as he has fully accepted a reality that Kiah is just beginning to question.
At What Cost?
One of the most unsettling aspects of Witness? is its portrayal of compliance. This is not a dystopia ruled by an oppressive force but a society where control is embedded in culture. There are no enforcers or threats of punishment because people have simply accepted this as the way things must be.
The film echoes Logan’s Run (1976), where people die at thirty to maintain balance, but it is more thematically akin to The Giver. In Lois Lowry’s novel, the protagonist, Jonas, is chosen to inherit memories of a past filled with both beauty and suffering. These are things his society has erased in the pursuit of peace. Like Jonas, Kiah begins to see the world differently. She struggles to understand why no one resists and why a system that claims to be for the greater good still feels so deeply wrong. So, while others see only necessity, she begins to see the cost.
At its core, Can I Get a Witness? is a meditation on memory, legacy, and the quiet burden of witnessing. In a world that has chosen stability over individuality, Kiah’s role becomes more than just a job. It is an act of preservation in a society that demands forgetting. The film does not pass judgment on this world but instead asks its audience to reflect on the systems we already live under and ponder these questions: Are we already placing the burden of change on individuals rather than addressing the deeper structures that create suffering? And is a world free of hardship worth it if it comes at the cost of free will?
