杏吧原创

Pailin Wedel

Netflix

THE world 鈥� including this magazine 鈥� hasn鈥檛 shied away from expressing opinions about the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, the US non-profit founded by Fred and Linda Chamberlain in 1972 to freeze corpses and body parts in the hope of one day resurrecting the dead.

Most observers are content with interrogating Alcor鈥檚 bizarre mission by asking if technologies for resurrection will ever be viable. This, of course, is a non-question: who knows what is around the corner? The successful freezing and thawing of a whole rabbit brain in 2016 shows how careful we must be in dismissing such ideas.

Mark O鈥機onnell鈥檚 approach in To Be a Machine was more fruitful: he asked why people would want to freeze themselves or their loved ones at all. Hope Frozen, filmed in Thailand at around the time O鈥機onnell was writing his book, goes some way towards an answer.

Matheryn, nicknamed Einz, was born in 2013 to parents Nareerat and Sahatorn Naovaratpon. For more than two years, they and their besotted son, Matrix, filmed hour after hour of the little girl鈥檚 life. She was 鈥� and is still, in Pailin Wendel鈥檚 ravishing, painful documentary 鈥� captivating.

Just before her third birthday, Einz died of ependymoblastoma. After 10 surgical operations, 12 bouts of chemotherapy and 20 rounds of radiation therapy, her family and the doctors knew it was coming: this highly aggressive brain cancer is a killer.

鈥淪ome critics in Thailand, a mostly Buddhist country, felt the family had thwarted Einz鈥檚 reincarnation鈥�

At the eleventh hour, Sahatorn persuaded his family that on her death, her brain and some of her tissue should be frozen and transferred to Alcor鈥檚 Arizona facility. Einz became the youngest person to be cryonically preserved. The story created a media storm in Thailand. In the film, some critics in this mostly Buddhist country complained that her family had prevented Einz鈥檚 reincarnation and consigned her to limbo.

Sahatorn and Nareerat, meanwhile, are both working engineers, and Sahatorn says they have put their faith in science. Matrix, caught in the middle as a novice monk and a gifted student of science, carries the weight of this dilemma with admirable fortitude. At the end of the film, my strongest wish was that he would one day escape these competing pressures and live his own life.

Yet anyone hoping for a uniquely Buddhist take on the transhumanist promise will be disappointed. There is very little to distinguish Buddhist objections from wider unease about not leaving the dead to rest in peace.

Wedel lets the family speak for themselves. Inevitably, they come close to revealing the faultlines in their choices, especially Sahatorn. 鈥淚 don鈥檛 care that people say I can鈥檛 move on,鈥� he says. 鈥淚 don鈥檛 care because it鈥檚 true.鈥� When the family visits Alcor, Sahatorn loses himself in the technical details while Nareerat weeps quietly.

Hope Frozen leaves me worrying that by denying themselves some form of spiritual afterlife for Einz, her relatives have lost her twice over. They have lost her physical form and now they can鈥檛 even animate her spirit in their imaginations. 鈥淔or sure, we are headed towards deathlessness,鈥� says Sahatorn, proselyting for the strange scientistic faith that is his defence against grief.

He isn鈥檛 wrong: from cryonics to CRISPR gene editing, there is no shortage of effort going into avoiding death. As Wedel鈥檚 upsetting film reveals, however, deathlessness isn鈥檛 life.