Death is not wasted on the dead, exactly, but much that follows in its black-veiled wake is: After all, a heartfelt eulogy is often composed of warm words that we should have shared with the departed before they grew cold. Eighties soft rock band Mike and the Mechanics had a #1 hit with this very observation, of course: “I wish I could have told him in the living years,” they laughed, mourning unspoken father-son affections over waves of glossy synths . . Kirsten Johnsons wonderful new documentary “Dick Johnson is dead” takes the same sentiment and comes a step ahead of it, with less sentimentality storm und drang. A deeply heartfelt cinematic tribute to the filmmaker’s living father Richard, made with his good-humoured collaboration as he slowly slips into Alzheimer’s limbo, it also serves as a witty, thoughtful rumination on death itself, how we prepare for it (or not), and what which may or may not come next.

Already snapped up by Netflix, which is sure to keep this unique item in the documentary conversation throughout 2020, “Dick Johnson is Dead” represents a significant stylistic departure from DP turned director Johnson’s exquisite debut “Cameraperson” — an endeavor as personal as it is skillfully stitched compiled a career’s worth of work behind the camera into a brilliant archival memoir.

Here, as she instead casts her gaze forward into the unknown of mortality and beyond, the focus is on creating new images: both of the present life as she and Richard currently know it, and of an afterlife imaginatively imagined as a glittering decoupage of multiple eras and alternate timelines. This is a rare, extravagantly playful response to the personal terror and tumult of aging and watching loved ones fade before our very eyes. Unfazed by the seriousness of their subject, filmmaker and subject are mutually happy to risk kitsch, bad taste and inky gallows humor in the process – because, well, whose death is it really?

A clue as to why Johnson has taken this unconventional, sometimes irreverent approach to a potentially tender subject comes in a short, quietly cutting snippet of archival footage that ties “Dick Johnson is Dead” to “Cameraperson”: a grainy home video of Johnson’s late. mother Katie Jo, deep in the fog of Alzheimer’s disease, struggles to identify her daughter by name or face. Some of the most poignant episodes of “Cameraperson” also documented the disorienting effect of Katie Jo’s dementia before her death in 2007; here, Johnson ruefully admits that these harrowingly vulnerable videos are the only ones she has of her mother at all.

With Richard, a retired clinical psychologist, diagnosed with the same inexorable disease, Johnson is determined to describe his final years in a different way. Still, the purpose of “Dick Johnson is Dead” isn’t just to preserve evidence of his bright, loving personality and their tender, joke-filled relationship before his memory and self-esteem falter irrevocably. More provocatively, father and daughter collaborate to fake his demise through cinematic artifice and forgery, allowing Richard to “die” and rise again on his own conscious terms—thus preparing them both for the less controlled inevitability of his demise. Increasingly elaborate accidental deaths are elaborated and staged repeatedly with stunt doubles; a kind of heaven is built and dressed to showy extremes; his most detailed preferences for the ideal afterlife are considered and realized with a flourish. (If you can’t get the toe deformities that have bothered you all your life fixed with a double foot when you die, when can you?)

There is exuberant comedy in these games and fantasies, but also a sly note of spiritual defiance. Johnson grew up in a conservative Seventh-day Adventist household, with its strict restrictions on everyday pleasures (no dancing, no alcohol, no movies) and its firm belief in Christian mortality: the notion that souls rather than ascend to the afterlife. of believers remain unconscious between death and resurrection, to be awakened only when Christ returns to earth.

Johnson carefully negotiates a conflicted relationship with this faith, first violated in childhood, when Richard took her to see “Young Frankenstein”; her becoming a filmmaker herself represents an emphatic completion of that arc. Richard’s own religious status is never clearly established, though the cheerful designer heaven they build together—an anti-Adventist milieu by virtue of its existence, even before you get to its jazzy choreographed dance numbers and movie stars—suggests a will. to define his faith according to his particular values ​​and passions. “The Bible says we will be resurrected, and that’s good enough for me,” he concludes with a smile, well aware that he will soon forget such finer theological distinctions.

Because there it is: As wildly unhinged and exuberant as Johnson’s film often is in the face of grim reality, the sense of a ticking, unforgiving clock in the background never disappears. Editor and co-writer Nels Bangerter gives the plot a firm chronological backbone amid its parallel universe fancies. The gradual deterioration of Richard’s physical and mental strength, as he moves from the family home in Seattle to his daughter’s New York apartment, is tracked with sometimes heart-stopping perceptiveness by Johnson’s ever-keen camera.

“He’s so rarely himself anymore,” she says, with the knowing resignation of someone who has already endured the pain of losing a parent twice: first to Alzheimer’s and then to the Reaper. At least this bold, inventive elegy for a father makes it clear to all viewers who she means when he says “himself”: At once a celebration and a lament, simultaneously jubilant and indescribably sad, it’s a film worth sticking around for see.