Faces of Death

After an unsuccessful open heart procedure, pathologist Francis B. Gröss reveals his fascination with the transitional moments between life and death. He explains that his surgical career has desensitized him to grotesque deaths, and he has compiled a reel of footage to map the many faces of death. This opening frame sets up the documentary style journey the film will follow.

The film shows a montage of animal deaths, including a man killed by an alligator. Gröss calls this a violent retaliation from a creature that has suffered abuse from mankind. The sequence introduces the theme that death emerges from cruelty and imbalance in nature.

Gröss narrates over clips of assassinations and observes that humans are the only species to kill for greed. Assassin François Jordan is interviewed and says he kills only for payment, not for political or social value, and that he would decline such missions if given a choice. The segment highlights the moral ambiguity surrounding murder-for-hire.

A gunfight erupts between a SWAT team and an armed murderer. Tear gas fills the house, and when the team enters they discover the killer's family stabbed to death. Gröss questions whether the killer's actions were shaped by society or by other unseen forces.

Larry DeSilva is executed by electric chair. Gröss ponders whether two wrongs make a right and reflects on the ethical ambiguity of capital punishment. The sequence probes the moral cost of taking life as a form of justice.

Gröss visits the Los Angeles County coroner's office where Dr. Thomas Noguchi is embalming multiple corpses after autopsies. The footage includes a bloated drowned woman and a decapitated man whose skin has been peeled from the skull. Noguchi tells him that life is a purely transitory state.

One cadaver, Samuel Berkowitz, undergoes cryopreservation with bodily fluids replaced by a low freezing point liquid before being stored in a freezer for future revival. The sequence underscores attempts to cheat death through science. Gröss uses this to question the limits of medical intervention.

The theater of preservation leads to a discussion on suicide, punctuated by footage of a woman leaping from a building. Gröss admits this death is a face of death he wishes never to face again, underscoring the raw horror of self-inflicted death.

The film shifts to the wars of history, including the Holocaust, with footage of German forces in battle. The sequence ends with Nazis being annihilated and symbols of Nazism destroyed, and Gröss remarks that Hitler lost control of his army and his mind.

Images of litter and pollution give way to scenes of sick children in impoverished villages. The segment broadens the study of the horrific face of death to include environmental and social decay. Gröss ties these images to a larger pattern of human suffering.

Nature footage includes a search party finding a body in a cave, a drowned man on a beach, and a bear mauling campers. The scenes illustrate the precariousness and randomness of death in the natural world.

A venomous snake cult in Louisville kills a handler, and a cannibalistic cult consumes a cadaver stolen from a morgue before taking part in an orgy. Gröss frames these acts as further manifestations of humanity's capacity for death and cruelty.

Another string of tragic accidents culminates in a parachute jump that ends in death when the chute fails to open. Gröss disputes the notion that the death was quick and painless, arguing that the person would have remained conscious during the fall.

Footage and photographs from PSA Flight 182 depict the grisly aftermath: crash site wreckage, shattered houses, and witness accounts. Gröss notes the neighborhood smells of rot and jet fuel, calling the mutilated torso the worst face of death.

Gröss introduces the supernatural dimension by meeting Joseph Binder, whose wife and son died and now appear as ghosts in their home. Parapsychologists document footprints and apparitions, and Binder communicates with his family through a medium. Gröss concludes that the soul persists after death and remains a traveler, and the film closes with peaceful music and images of birth and family.