Finding Peace With Mortality Through Film, How Two Films Changed the Way I Think About Death
In an era flooded with rough AI-generated videos and endless streams of content, I suddenly felt the urge to recommend two older works that left a lasting mark on me:
Dreams and Midnight Mass.
Both helped me confront a subject that many people avoid talking about: death.
Like sex education, death was rarely discussed when I was growing up. School didn’t teach me much about it. My parents didn’t either.
Yet death is one of the few experiences every human being must eventually face alone.
For years, I searched for my own answers.
A Winter Night I Never Forgot
When I was a child, my family lived in an apartment building connected to a hospital.
From my bedroom window, I could see the inpatient ward and the emergency center. Ambulances came and went throughout the night, flashing red and blue lights through the darkness.
One winter evening, a patient apparently did not survive.
Outside the hospital entrance, a family member sat on the steps and cried with a grief so raw that it cut through the night.
I lay awake for hours.
I was afraid to move.
As strange as it sounds, I felt that if I turned over in bed, the sound of that grief would somehow find me.
My family slept peacefully in the next room.
But a thought kept circling in my mind:
One day, everyone I love and I will be separated forever.
For the first time, the sentence “everyone dies eventually” stopped being an abstract idea and became something real.
Death felt cold.
Final.
Heartbreaking.
And from that moment on, stories about ghosts and the afterlife were no longer enough for me.
I wanted a deeper answer.
A Village That Changed My View of Death
Years later, I watched Akira Kurosawa’s film Dreams.
One segment in particular stayed with me: “Village of the Watermills.”
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In the story, the protagonist discovers an idyllic village untouched by modern life.
There he meets a man over one hundred years old who is preparing to attend the funeral of his first love.
But the funeral is unlike anything we usually imagine.
The villagers sing.
They carry flowers.
They celebrate the life that has been lived.
Death is not treated as a tragedy alone, but as a return to the earth that gave life in the first place.
For the first time, I encountered a vision of death that contained peace.
Not denial.
Not fear.
Not despair.
Peace.
Since then, my ideal funeral has looked very different from the traditional image.
I imagine music instead of silence.
Laughter alongside tears.
Friends gathering not only to mourn, but also to celebrate a life well lived.
If I ever have a gravestone, I know what I would like it to say:
“This was a happy person.”
To me, happiness is not a reward at the end of life.
It is the goal itself.
Another Answer
There was another fear I carried for many years.
I was deeply uncomfortable with the physical reality of death.
The idea of burial unsettled me.
The thought that a body carefully maintained throughout life would eventually return to decay felt difficult to accept.
Then I watched Midnight Mass.
Among its many themes is a conversation about what happens after death.
The explanation is not religious in the traditional sense.
Nor is it entirely scientific.
Instead, it presents a view of existence that feels both cosmic and deeply human.
The idea that our bodies return to the larger cycle of life.
That the atoms that make us who we are continue their journey through the universe.
That nothing is truly isolated.
That even the smallest life carries meaning.
I found that perspective surprisingly comforting.
Not because it removed death.
But because it softened it.
It transformed death from a cold ending into a form of continuation.
A return.
A reunion with something larger than ourselves.
The Search Continues
I do not claim to have solved the mystery of death.
I still do not feel ready for it.
Perhaps no one ever truly is.
But through stories, films, books, and conversations, I have gradually made peace with some of the fear.
Cinema cannot answer every question.
Yet sometimes a work of art shines a small light into a dark corner of the human experience.
For me, Dreams and Midnight Mass did exactly that.
They did not eliminate death.
They helped me look at it with a little less fear.
And that, perhaps, is enough for now.
The search for answers continues.
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