Critical Care (1997) is going to be my next Mortality Movie Night selection on February 7. Register through this Meetup event.
If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if a hospital ethics committee, an insurance company, and a dysfunctional family were locked in a room together and told to decide whether someone lives or dies, congratulations, you’ve basically described Critical Care.
Directed by Sidney Lumet (because of course it is) and starring James Spader at his most smug-to-shell-shocked, this 1997 black comedy skewers the American healthcare system with a scalpel sharpened by satire. Think ER by way of Franz Kafka… with ICD-10 codes (that’s the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision).
This is not a cozy movie about death. This is a Mortality Movie that laughs nervously while asking questions most of us would rather avoid until someone’s already hooked up to machines.
James Spader (L) as an ICU doctor in Critical Care.
The Setup: A Body, a Bed, and a Bureaucratic Nightmare
Spader plays a hospital resident who stumbles into an ICU nightmare: an elderly man lies comatose on life support, while his two half-daughters wage a legal and emotional war over whether he should stay alive or be allowed to die.
One daughter wants to pull the plug. The other wants everything done. And shockingly, their motivations may not be entirely altruistic.
The patient, notably, never weighed in. No living will. No advance directive. No Five Wishes tucked into a drawer. Just silence, and a lot of beeping machines.
Why Critical Care Earns Its Mortality Movie Badge
1. End-of-Life in the ICU
This film lives in that uncomfortable gray zone where someone is technically alive but existentially suspended. It asks the question we rarely say out loud: At what point does treatment stop being care?
2. The Business of Death
Insurance rules, hospital billing, and profit motives loom over every decision. The message is blunt: money doesn’t just follow medical decisions, it shapes them. Compassion, meet the bottom line.
3. The Ethical Tug-of-War
Who gets to decide when a patient can’t speak? Family? Doctors? Courts? Accountants? Critical Care treats this question like a hot potato no one wants to hold, but everyone keeps tossing around.
4. A Doctor Having an Existential Crisis (Relatable!)
Spader’s character starts out confident and detached, then slowly realizes that “doing the right thing” is messy, exhausting, and often unrewarded. Moral burnout isn’t just a buzzword, it’s a workplace hazard.
5. Satire That Hits a Little Too Close to Home
Yes, the film exaggerates. But not by much. Futile care. Family guilt. Financial incentives. The chaos that erupts when no one talked about death before it showed up uninvited.
You laugh… and then you feel slightly uncomfortable about why you’re laughing.
Questions Worth Losing Sleep Over (a.k.a. Discussion Prompts)
What does “quality of life” actually mean here, and who gets to define it?
Are the financial pressures exaggerated, or just painfully honest?
How realistic are the daughters’ motivations? Where do love, guilt, and inheritance collide?
How different would this story be if the patient had an advance directive?
Does the film do justice to the ethical burden placed on healthcare workers?
Does satire help us talk about death or does it risk trivializing real pain?
(There are no easy answers. Which is kind of the point.)
Bonus: Mortality Movie Night, but Make It Useful
Pair Critical Care with a talk or workshop titled:
“Flatline or Bottom Line? End-of-Life Choices in a Profit-Driven System.”
Hand out sample POLST or Five Wishes forms. Encourage people to talk, really talk, about what they’d want before a James Spader look-alike has to guess on their behalf.
And sure, include a coupon for a living will. Because laughter may be the best medicine… but paperwork is a very close second.
Gail Rubin, CT
Gail Rubin, Certified Thanatologist and The Doyenne of Death
Gail Rubin, CT, The Doyenne of Death, is a pioneering, internationally-recognized death educator. She’s author of the award-winning books A Good Goodbye: Funeral Planning for Those Who Don’t Plan to Die, Kicking the Bucket List: 100 Downsizing and Organizing Things to Do Before You Die, Hail and Farewell: Cremation Ceremonies, Templates and Tips, and the Before I Die Festival in a Box. Her next book is 98.6 Mortality Movies to See Before You Die.
She is also the coordinator of the award-winning Before I Die New Mexico Festival, a pioneer of the Death Cafe movement in the United States, creator of The Newly-Dead Game, and host of the Mortality Movies TV series and Mortality Movie Night events. She is a two-time TEDx speaker on end-of-life issues. Learn more here.