Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Life Overtakes Me’ On Netflix, A Documentary About Refugee Children Who Shut Down When Faced With Deportation

Life Overtakes Me is only 40 minutes long, but it’s definitely a tough watch, because it shows children, lying unconscious in their family homes, not responding to their parents or anything else. They’re afflicted with a condition called Resignation Syndrome, because it’s their only way to cope with the extreme stress and uncertainty their families are under. Read on for more about this fascinating documentary…

LIFE OVERTAKES ME: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Life Overtakes Me, a documentary short directed by John Haptas and Kristine Samuelson, shows the unintended effects of the uncertain life of refugee families, focusing on three families in Sweden. All of the families have been through extreme situations in their home countries — mostly Balkan states or former Soviet republics — that have forced them to seek asylum in Sweden. While their residential status has been up in the air, though, the children in these families have been suffering from Resignation Syndrome.

What happens with Resignation Syndrome is that the child starts withdrawing from the outside world, at first refusing to eat, eventually slipping into a coma-like state that can last for months or years. Currently, hundreds of refugee children are suffering from this syndrome, basically looking like they’re constantly sleeping. We see the parents of the children shown in this documentary, ranging from 8 to 12 years old, caring for their unresponsive children by talking to them, stretching their ankles and joints, working their muscles to stave off atrophy, and taking them out to make sure they get fresh air.

Various psychiatrists and therapists are interviewed — all off camera over lingering pictures of winterscapes, which mimic how these children are feeling — and they don’t quite know what causes this, how children come out of it, and why there seems to be a concentration in Sweden. But the stories their parents tell of being threatened if they stay in their home countries, or a child witnessing someone in their car being shot and killed, paired with the uncertainty that they may be yanked to their secure situations and deported back to their unstable home countries, overwhelm these kids and make them withdraw.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: We can’t think of any.

Performance Worth Watching: It’s so heartbreaking watching these parents desperately try to get through to their unresponsive children, bathe them, inject slushy formula into their feeding tubes, put them in strollers to take outside, and all these once-vibrant kids do is lay there limp with their eyes closed.

Memorable Dialogue: “Your child is lying here like Snow White because everything is so terrible around her, this is her way of protection,” says child psychiatrist Anne-Liis von Knorring as the film opens, saying that the parents suffer more than the children in this case.

Our Take: An obviously unmoved IMDb user reviewed this film by saying “It felt almost too absurd to be real,” and in a way, that emotional robot is right. Samuelson and Haptas have given the 40-minute Life Overtakes Me a dream-like quality, with the lingering winter scapes and long, silent passages with these comatose children. But Resignation Syndrome is all too real, and the hundreds of cases in Sweden, and as the film’s postscript mentions, in refugee detention centers in Australia, have sent governmental health officials scrambling to figure out how to treat it.

At a certain point, the film becomes as much about the plight of refugees in Sweden as it is about Resignation Syndrome. The uncertainty the Swedish government puts these families through, despite the threats they face if they’re deported, is what is making these kids withdraw, because the stress is just too overwhelming to their developing minds. The message is subtle, but it’s there, with the directors saying to a global audience, “Look at what government inaction and red tape are doing to these children!”. It’s an effective way of showing it, and as we follow the cases of the three families featured, you can see which kids start to come out of it and which just withdraw more, simply because there’s some hope.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Life Overtakes Me is definitely a tough watch. But it’s worthwhile to put it on just to be aware of the extreme stress refugee families — especially their children — go through in other parts of the world.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream Life Overtakes Me on Netflix