In Luke Lorentzen‘s A Still Small Voice, Margaret Engel is participating in a yearlong residency at Mount Sinai Hospital’s spiritual department. If viewers look at this a certain way, she’s good at the job that she wants to have. From experience, most hospital chaplains just say a prayer for the departed and their relatives as part of their job. Margaret, or Mati, gets to know the people in palliative care, talking to them like they’re lifelong friends. The same goes for when she’s performing a baptism for a stillborn child, using improv and research.

That baptism is one of A Still Small Voice‘s most poignant scenes, a different version of my experience. There’s some humour in Mati, a Jewish woman, explaining this ritual to Christians, but she still gets this sacrament’s importance. Births and deaths are scientific, but humans place a spiritual aspect to those events that she still respects. Mati’s not good on other aspects of the job though, consisting of meetings where she steers the conversation. She’s present in those meetings, but her input to the conversation heightens the tensions between her and supervisor, David.

I don’t know how to quantify the stakes in A Still Small Voice, a documentary mostly about death. I may get into the genre later, but the discussions about death remind me of an old adage about life and death. Death is for the living, for the survivors to say their prayers so God can maybe listen. in A Still Small Voice, Mati confesses, grimly, that she has no idea where her prayers are going. This speaks to a burnout that’s prevalent within training chaplains, a state that David doesn’t want her to have.

Now, on to genres, subgenres, and microgenres – this isn’t the first behind the scenes documentary that I have seen.  The choice here is to make half of the documentary about groundwork and the other about meetings. There is a part of me that wishes there was more of the former half than the latter half. Besides, if A Still Small Voice shows all these meetings, why not depict more than one of the chaplains? Its choice to focus on Mati gives this more a docudrama feel which puts its authentic depictions into question.

Some choices like showing the banal aspects of palliative care and its fluorescent-ness also hold this documentary back. I’m still hung up on A Still Small Voice‘s choice on mostly capturing Mati’s conflicts and work philosophy. She performs her job when she’s there but she disregards basic things like calling work when she’s not well. Her interactions with David also shows her privilege and I’d rather see someone with less sense of entitlement. I did question this documentary’s authenticity but at least she brings that dynamic that’s common in documentaries about work.

A Still Small Voice comes to MUBI Canada.