The next time someone asks why you’re on your phone so much, tell them you’re just working on your Immortality Project.
It’s a concept from cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker’s 1973 book “The Denial of Death,” which posits that most of what humans spend our time on is meant to pretend the inevitable isn’t waiting for us. But Kent McKinney’s new documentary, “Sacred Science,” explores an alternative to this illusion of immortality — confronting mortality through the therapeutic usage of psychedelics.
The film opens with the tragic statistic that 10 million people around the world die every year of cancer, establishing how profound and debilitating a diagnosis can be on one’s ability to see their own lives as anything but an upside-down hourglass, grains of sand plummeting to an unavoidable collapse. The crux of the documentary focuses on the use of psilocybin, but as part of monitored treatment with mental health professionals rather than recreational use.
For decades, a variety of doctors and scientists, like the documentary’s Baltimore-based subject Dr. Bill Richards, have pioneered these methods through years of study. Sabba, the platform for the University Psychedelic Education Program, collaborates with dozens of colleges around the nation to help build the framework for the future of therapeutic usage. Johns Hopkins, under Richards and others, has been at the forefront of this research, despite various waves of backlash and controversy over the years. Unlike the “Acid Test” Day-Glo tripping of the ’60s, these studies are done in a highly controlled clinical setting, and it is one of the goals of this film and its collaborators for this kind of treatment to become more readily accessible to the masses, which feels like a vital and noble pursuit.
As a viewing experience, however, “Sacred Science” leaves a lot to be desired. Intercutting its talking head interviews with bland, interchangeable stock footage, the film at times more closely resembles a corporate training video than a meaningful exploration of some truly heady ideas.
Perhaps it is a function of the history of psychedelics in cinema that the documentary’s production value limitations prove so distracting. There’s a rich pantheon of experimental art out there that employs images in an attempt to replicate the effects of these substances, but that visual language and its pervasiveness through pop cultural osmosis is nowhere to be found in this doc. Since it is intended as an informative look at a serious subject, it doesn’t necessarily need to compete with “Fantastic Planet” to be palatable. But because of the frank simplicity of the approach, when the patients share recollections of deep breakthroughs they experienced during treatment, it can feel like a coworker telling you about a dream they had.
We’re not privy to recordings of the sessions themselves or live shots of anyone actually tripping. Rather, we listen and watch as they recount how the experiences affected their worldviews, with only one notable recreation of a particular vision. That sequence, utilizing some crude CGI animation to bring the trip to life, feels like a reductive approximation given how unimaginative it looks in relation to the impact the real thing seems to have had.
Through the interstitial use of quotes from William Blake and the film “Field of Dreams,” the doc feels a little too Instagram infographic-coded. But the more intimate conversations with those who have experienced the treatment firsthand prove the most compelling. The two main patients featured in the film, Pradeep Bansal and Kathy Kral, experience journeys that support the main thesis of psychedelics helping the terminally ill overcome their fears of dying. But it’s in the ways they learn to actually live more fully that the picture begins to feel invaluable. We can’t always effectively glean the full scope of what they see and feel during the treatment, but in talking about their views before and after the experiences, their predicaments and subsequent healing speak to those who haven’t been diagnosed with a heavy illness.
There’s a passage early on where the film’s narration points out that the average American spends more time looking at a screen than they do sleeping, and that there’s an “architecture of distraction” that has made the simple act of being alone with one’s thoughts into a Herculean undertaking. The film initially hones in on the specifics of cancer and its relation to mortality, but it also hits on how essential expanding one’s imagination is to healthier living.
Everyone isn’t facing the uncertainty that diagnosis brings, but a lot of us sprint towards burnout in the compulsive pursuit of a more productive life. Those of us not lost in staying perpetually busy are likely doing the opposite, becoming ever more enveloped in social media’s facsimile of community.
In one of the film’s more mind-blowing moments, Tony Massey, the CEO of Maryland based Gladstone Psychiatry and Wellness, tells the story of a teenager suffering from anxiety and depression whose psilocybin and low-dose ketamine treatments reaped faster and more thorough dividends than he had ever seen: In two weeks Massey saw the kind of changes that many would spend the same number of years in traditional psychotherapy to experience. Anyone who has ever struggled with adapting to various antidepressants and SSRIs might perk up at this seemingly effective alternative.
As a result, despite Massey’s insistence that such treatments aren’t the best option for everyone, the scene feels a bit like some kind of infomercial. The implied critique of society’s addiction to staying busy and producing for the capitalist machine runs right up against the picture’s underlying goals of changing the health care industry itself.
While the intricacies of the science and the complexities of its place within the established therapeutic frameworks feel like great jumping on points for further personal research, it’s the ideas about how much smaller we’ve allowed our worlds to become that linger the most. Even if the particular avenues “Sacred Science” pursues may not be the ones you leave the theater wanting to follow, it’ll be hard not to ponder the ways modern living has dulled our connections to nature and to empathy, and what each of us must change to get them back.
“Sacred Science” premieres at The Parkway on Thursday, September 10 at 7 p.m. There will be a Q&A with Producer/Director Kent McKinney after, presented by Baltimore Psychedelic Society.