New York City houses one of the oldest teaching hospitals in the US, the Mount Sinai Hospital. In it, there are a multitude of programs designed to aid healthcare workers and those in training for spiritual care. In a residency during the height of New York’s state of emergency, Margaret “Mati” Engel works tirelessly to tend to patients facing their own mortality, providing comfort where the medical staff cannot. Mati takes time to hear each patient’s experiences and fears for their immediate future and present while offering personal and spiritual peace. But this comes at a cost to her own mental and physical capacities, and Mati’s own internal struggles with religion come into question once she sees how dire the portrait of humanity has become.
Leading the residency at this time is Rev. David Fleenor, who has taken charge of meeting with each member in residence to check in on their progress with patients they meet with regularly. He leads group discussions meant to focus everyone’s energies on unpacking the events of their meetings with patients and hearing others’ stories, including their personal concerns with approaching issues related to patient relations and the medical system in place. Due to the nature of the American healthcare system, a great many issues arise from just this topic, frontloading every trainee’s stress load before interpersonal or religious burdens even enter the equation.
The kind nature of A Still Small Voice comes through in its matter-of-fact landscape of alien and uncaring observation rooms juxtaposed against the warm comforts the chaplains of Mount Sinai provide. In their care, even the most inhospitable environments can become a balm, a place where those can rightfully grieve the loss of family or a loved one as it has just happened. The camera lingers in the space of each of these extremely intimate and private moments, making us feel like we shouldn’t be there but also sharing in the solace those who need it receive. Despite putting its audience on edge by placing us in these hypersensitive moments, the credits explain that every moment we see that seems too invasive was in fact agreed upon between the subjects and filmmakers ahead of time. The consensual agreements noted within Still Small Voice form a kind of consistent golden standard that nearly always stays constant in how Mati communicates, both to patients and to her colleagues.
The syntax and approach Fleenor engages in with the group seem extremely inclusive and thoughtful, regarding almost every aspect of the human experience that acknowledges the immense cost of what they do and the existential weight of it all. And we see Mati working through it all, powering through her own unimaginable weight of stress and questioning of a higher power that has not only allowed so many people to die unflinching during a pandemic borne out of bureaucracy and negligence but a higher power that has allowed the genocide of an entire people by the hands of the Nazis.
Mati takes her workload on at the cost of her own soul and runs it near ragged trying to provide comfort and closure to those who need her in each moment. She poses a question to the group during a meeting Fleenor leads: if a patient calls her directly during paid time off seeking guidance that means the difference between life or death, where is the line drawn between the worker’s contract and the guilt of not answering the call and wondering if that person will take their life tonight? Her answer to this is already determined but it doesn’t fall in line with the one Fleenor provides, which has to honor the obligations the hospital as a business must ensure is being followed. This sets Mati on a path that diverges from what Mount Sinai claims to do on paper and what must be done according to the policies in place. Rules and regulations never allow for human compassion or exception, and once those become the driving force for care there becomes a wedge driven between those who depend on care coming from a real desire to help and those who have no choice but to bend to the laws a corporation sets to limit how far empathy can extend.
Throughout Mati’s taxing journey, she finds herself opening up more intimately with every patient she is in charge of. But in readjusting to the necessities of human souls she is willing to meet, Mati rubs up against the monster of policies and procedures that contradict the entire reason she has been called to help. In one-on-one meetings with Fleenor, Mati grows more and more uncomfortable with how he communicates the desire for results. And for Mati, there is a breaking point. Splitting herself in two, she finds that the largest burden in her residency is not with the patients themselves but with the system in which she has agreed to operate. From here her concerns and questions about the institutions of religious belief, at least Judiastic beliefs, come around to the cold rigidity of the business practices healthcare believes in until it becomes a perfect circle of how an entity in charge can let people in need wither and die before they are allowed help at all.
A Still Small Voice is a guided tour through the tense pulse of the US during the height of COVID, and as of now still has yet to come down from its full strain on the senses of the populace. It is by no means an easy watch but by peering through the wide window Mati casts into her personality by the documentary’s end, we can see parts of ourselves that may have burned out long before Mati or perhaps after. But the audience’s act of examination becomes therapeutic and cleansing even if it brings back the negative sensations of anxiety from the first couple of years of the pandemic. As Mati breaks through the wall of her own limitations we realize that we can do the same, and in her shared story of struggle, there is a key to be found for us to triumph over all.
A Still Small Voice is currently playing in select theaters courtesy of Abramaorama.
A Still Small Voice is a guided tour through the tense pulse of the US during the height of COVID, and as of now still has yet to come down from its full strain on the senses of the populace. It is by no means an easy watch but by peering through the wide window Mati casts into her personality by the documentary’s end, we can see parts of ourselves that may have burned out long before Mati or perhaps after.
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GVN Rating 9
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Andre is an avid film watcher, blogger and podcaster. You can read their words on film at letterboxd and medium, and hear their voice on movies, monsters, and other weird things on Humanoids From the Deep Dive every other Monday. In their “off” time they volunteer as a film projectionist, reads fiction & nonfiction, comics, and plays video games until it’s way too late.