‘The Mother Situation’ by Matt Day

In this short film, three adult siblings come together in the family home for their mother’s planned assisted death. However, her nurse tells them that their mum has changed her mind and shows them a note she has written saying “I don’t want to do it”. While initially thankful, the siblings soon discover that their mother also doesn’t want to move out and sell her house, robbing them of the cash they were expecting upon her death. They begin arguing over who deserves the inheritance money more and then ask the nurse whether she convinced their mother to change her mind. When the nurse seems open to carrying on with the assisted death - “I get it. She’s hard work and, if she was my mother, I’d want to kill her too” – they fire her, and instead confront their mother about her decision, claiming they don’t want her to suffer more than necessary. They are then shown setting up the already-present suicide kit with their mother watching on. The film cuts to the siblings waiting tensely in the living room as a man walks in. Rather than telling them their mother is dead, he gives the house’s value at AUS$ 2.5-2.8m. The siblings react with exaggerated relief and embrace each other.

The film neatly explores the coercion and elder abuse that could result if assisted dying was legal and surrounding family members felt that someone was a burden. Its broad humour, including jokes about spending money on cancer treatment for an elderly poodle and the taking of suffocation bag selfies, situates assisted dying as a middle-class concern alongside economic pressures and keeping up appearances. Notably, the mother never talks so that her actual feelings are not made clear. Instead, the siblings are left to expose their own desires and assumptions. Although the film explored the negative impact of legalisation just as the issue was being seriously debated in Australian parliaments, the director Matt Day claimed that he was broadly in support of assisted dying and the film was really about middle-class greed. However, this has not stopped those opposed to changes in the law from using the film as evidence for the possible coercion that might result from legalisation, including in statements to state and territory parliamentary inquiries on the subject. The film won the 25th Tropfest Short Film Festival.