A controversial and divisive debate in Italy in 2009, the right-to-die case of Eluana Englaro figures as the catalyst around which Bellocchio’s fictional lives divide or unite over painful life and death quandaries. In a vegetative state for seventeen years, Eluana’s case consumes all of the media, government and Vatican time as profound questions are either avoided or deliberated by those wrestling with their own existential crises. A senator attempts to vote his conscience, a man and woman on opposite sides of the controversy fall in love, an actress forgoes her career and her relationships in eternal anticipation of her comatose daughter’s resurrection, and an atheist doctor commits himself to an equally dubious cause. Through a vivid, intricate tangle of voices public and private, Bellocchio perceptively puzzles over the various mechanisms, obligations and devotions which keep everyone delicately balanced upon a frighteningly vast continuum of life.