Swan Song (2021)

Swan Song presents itself as science fiction and then conducts itself, for two hours, as a hushed domestic melodrama that happens to possess a cloning machine. Mahershala Ali plays Cameron Turner, a dying family man offered an experimental bargain: a duplicate to absorb his life so that his wife and son may grieve nothing. Apple's production values are immaculate. Vancouver stands in for a near future of soft light and softer furniture. Ali, in dual roles, does the heavy lifting with a stillness that the screenplay never quite earns.

The cast is notably diverse, and the film treats this fact the way it treats the weather, which is to say it declines to mention it. No character remarks on race. No argument is advanced about gender, though Naomie Harris and Glenn Close are permitted competence and a few sharp lines. The corporate entity selling human duplication is a plot device, not a target. The story belongs to a husband and a father, and its emotional ledger is entirely personal. We search the runtime for a thesis about the world and find only a thesis about a man.

None of this is a failing, exactly. The film is sincere, well acted, and mercifully free of sermonizing. It wants to move us and mostly does, in the manner of a very expensive television advertisement for mortality. It has no interest in instructing us. There is no lecture here, no cause, no accounting of historical wrongs, no climate anxiety, no body politics, no diagnosis of the age. It is a sad man in a beautiful house, deciding whether to spare his family pain. That is the whole of it, and the classification reflects as much.