Rachel Padley | The Witness / 2023

common ground

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert P Bruce (screenplay), Rachel Padley (director) The Witness / 2023 [15 minutes]

 

This 2023 film, produced by the Arts Council of Wales, not even listened on IMDb to my knowledge, is basically about religious homophobia, and in this particular case takes on the Jehovah Witnesses. I’m certain it is not popular in many sectors for having done so.

     A bit like the 1973 film version of Bruce Jay Friedman’s Steambath, two men wake up in a morgue trying to imagine, since they are talking to one another, why there are there.

      One an older man who has obviously been suffering from breathing problems is desperate to his husband Matthew, while the younger attempts to convince him they are dead, it was his time to die.

      But soon after, when the elder discovers the other is a Jehovah’s Witness, he becomes intolerant, dismissive of his religion—which he partially confuses with Mormonism because of their home visits in attempts at conversion. Yet the other attempts to explain to him that his religion or more a social vision, asking him to play out a typical visit wherein he offers him a copy of their magazine The Watchtower.

      It doesn’t go over well, and I have to admit there is no deep discussion at all about the religion. But the major thing that is apparent immediately is the other’s intolerance of gay people, which, of course, does not bode well for any even temporary relationship between the two dead men.

     The younger wonders about his sexual life, doesn’t “it” hurt? Our elder friend explains, yes the first time, but then it becomes pleasurable. He also attempts to explain that gay life is not just about sex, just as the other explains, knocking at doors is not all the Jehovah’s Witnesses do.

     Yet the two men do talk, one about both his sexual and fuller life with his husband Matthew, and the other about some momentary pleasures he has had within the confines of the church, including a trip to France for snowboarding.

     When the Jehovah’s witnesses talks about his attempts to dance, admitting that he can’t, our foxy elder teaches him a dance step or two.

     That is, until it becomes apparent that as the elder suggests, he the stranger may already be a “member of the club.” The younger man explains that he has been “disfellowshipped” from his religion, which also meant that he could no longer talk to his own family.

      He explains that he attempted to resist his homosexual feelings, but when they persisted he went to an elder of the church which led to his ostracization. When he attempted to contact his father by telephone, he asked whom he preferred, Jehovah or his son. His father answered his god and hung up.

      The boy committed suicide, which is perhaps why he knows he is dead, the boy now breaking down in the elder man’s arms, apologizing for all the terrible things he has said about being gay.

      The previously locked door is now open, and they must move on to the next stage, whatever that might be.

      Since I do not believe in an afterlife, this argument of this playlet (not truly a film) did not fully move me. But the thousands of deaths each year, some of whom this film mentioned by name at the end, moves me into a passionate anger against religious homophobia of all sorts, and only stokes my general anger against religious institutions in general. Strangely, the church I grew up in (American Northern Presbyterian) never told me how to behave sexually. But they I never asked. It was societal and family pressures that made me terrified of coming out. But I have long seen what religious beliefs can do to fuck up human beings of all sexes, and it angers me endlessly.

     As I’ve written elsewhere, my sexuality came to me as a bolt of realization in a college bedroom at the very same moment as my religious abandonment and my democratic leftist political views. They have always, for me, been inseparable.   

 

Los Angeles, October 6, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2026).