THIS MUCH WE KNOW – Review by Valerie Kalfrin

The documentary This Much We Know is like an essay in motion, pursuing tangents and possibilities but always circling back to the initial impulse, the unanswered question. It ponders a painful subject—suicide—but as director Lily Frances Henderson pulls on different threads, she also considers the unknowable. Concepts that are hard to fathom, with odds so phenomenal, they seem unreal until they’re not—and how people deal with such uncertainty.

A cinematographer making her feature directing debut, Henderson lost a friend to suicide years earlier. This Much We Know is sparse on details about her friend’s life, but what triggered her death inspired this film, essentially a peek inside Henderson’s mind. She has no easy answers, but she’s thoughtful and considerate. We can feel her weighing her findings in her long takes and staccato narration, describing her feelings even when they’re uncomfortable.

The film loosely follows Henderson as she speaks to the parents and friends of Levi Walton Presley IV, who died at sixteen in 2002 after climbing two security fences at the Stratosphere hotel and casino’s observation tower. A security guard spoke to him as he sat on a ledge one moment; in the next, he was gone. Henderson, who edited the film with Liz Deegan (Game and Glory), evokes the feeling of turning facts over repeatedly in one’s mind through several montages, such as one that builds from footage tracing Levi’s last steps to a crescendo of quick cuts, concussive images, and music before ebbing into reflective silence.

Henderson learned about Levi’s death while reading John D’Agata’s 2011 book About a Mountain, where the author explored the federal government’s plans to store nuclear waste inside Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, roughly 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Yet the book also wrestled with existential questions, delved into the high suicide rate in Las Vegas, and mentioned Levi’s death.

Unable to shake the whys surrounding her own friend’s death, Henderson reaches out to those who knew Levi, as well as Las Vegas and suicide prevention officials, searching their answers for the understanding she craves. She also takes a page from D’Agata and looks into the Yucca Mountain situation, which seems like a disparate topic but connects to her overall theme: How much can we ever know? And how do we cope with not knowing?

Named one of the “40 Under 40” emerging talents in the documentary field at this month’s DOC NYC festival, Henderson delicately weaves these threads together. She speaks to Levi’s parents gently and films them at a respectful distance, framing them in profile or reflected in a mirror. They share memories of their son and tiptoe around what they fear they missed.

Not everyone welcomes her examination. A caller she keeps anonymous tells her to let it go, that no matter what else she uncovers, what happened to Levi won’t change. The coroner at the time Levi died is professional but blunter than Henderson would like, pushing back on her calling her friend’s death or Levi’s an accident. There’s nothing accidental about the actions they took, he says, something Henderson admits causes her discomfort.

Yet her probing does, too. “I sometimes have this feeling that I want to protect what I believe of her,” she says of her friend. “How will the myth be shattered? What then?”

Cinematographer Ed David helps capture Henderson’s ambivalence with rotating shots of distant desert mountains juxtaposed with Vegas’s high-rise glitz. She pores through research about Yucca Mountain—a site first researched in 1982 and still not storing any waste, according to the EPA—hoping to learn how scientists study an unknown. One fidgets as she asks about potential change, quoting the Department of Energy’s own materials, despite his reassurances based on reams of paper reports and electronic records.

Distributed by Oscilloscope Laboratories, This Much We Know keeps returning to a journalist’s basic questions: who, what, where, when, why, and how. The answers promise to lead us to the truth, Henderson says, but sometimes, the most peace one can find is to stop asking.

As one counselor says: “There is no why.”