LAST FLIGHT HOME REVIEW– HEARTBREAKING PORTRAIT OF ASSISTED DYING

Ondi Timoner’s home-movie memoir is a heartbreaking and unexpectedly complex film about her elderly father in his final days. Eli Timoner was a swashbuckling entrepreneur who founded the budget airline Air Florida in the 1980s, became a stroke survivor in middle age, and finally, facing terrible ill-health, opted to end his own life under a Californian law that enforces a 15-day grace period in which the patient has time to reflect before the fatal drugs are administered. In fact they are self-administered: the applicant has to drink the hemlock-equivalent themselves, and there are wrenchingly tense scenes in which Mr Timoner tremblingly practises holding a cup in his hand. If he can’t, the whole thing is off.