Disability Documentary Is There Anybody Out There? Is a Broad, Familiar Video Diary

The desire to be wholly understood, to see yourself mirrored in another person, is a quest as eternal as it is futile. We don’t want to be alone, but we also tell ourselves that our uniqueness is part of what makes us valuable. That contradictory condition is at the heart of the debut feature from Ella Glendining, Is There Anybody Out There? Similarly themed to Reid Davenport’s Sundance doc from last year, I Didn’t See You There, which also tracks a personal exploration of disability and cites cinematic references such as Tod Browning’s Freaks, Is There Anybody Out There? is far less focused and far more literal than Davenport’s visual poetry. Glendining, who has no hip joints and short femurs, has created an often tedious video diary tracking her own relationship with disability, ableism (internalized and external) and family.

Because her body is extremely unique, Glendining makes it her goal to find someone built exactly like her. At least, at first. She finds and even meets a few people who can truly relate to her disability, but eventually realizes that this search for companionship and empathy is built on a complex assumption that can feel, at times, obviously incorrect: That everyone sharing a similar body shares the same experience and feelings towards their bodies. It’s an assumption that itself has a bit of condescension built in, even if there may be some truth in the case of her specific disability. But even in her small sample size, she finds a breadth of attitudes and experiences that push back against her premise. But this only takes up a portion of the film, as navigating its roundabout leads Glendining to other exits, like making broad observations about disabled kinship and the ableism prevalent in the medical field.

Is There Anybody Out There? changes objectives as often as it changes styles. Half of the time it’s intentionally amateurish and personal, with confessional front-camera phone vlogs accompanying laptop Zoom footage. The other half is blandly professional: Talking head interviews with her parents, archival footage from home videos and ignorant TV specials, slick Steadicam coverage of hospitals. Neither feels as honest as they intend. I dislike the deployment of the YouTube confessional style here (which has been, I suppose, farmed out to Instagram Reels and TikTok), because of its faux-realism. Its false closeness. Especially when juxtaposed with its more traditional aesthetic—most directly in an elevator sequence where a phone camera is turned upon cinematographer Annemarie Lean-Vercoe and her rig—we’re confronted with the itchiness of constructed intimacy. The form reflects the content, as Glendining’s rambling diary entries become knotted sequences of stumbling scriptedness and pointed staging. At least the camcorder footage of Glendining as a child lacks pretension, and is an especially effective foil to the ogling eye of British docuseries entry A Day in the Life of Kevin Donnellon.

This digression was understandably hard to avoid. The long production time—Glendining finds out she’s pregnant, has and raises her son, and weathers a new pandemic until she can travel abroad over the course of shooting—inherently rocks the boat. What vision could persist through all of that? But the effect is harder to forgive. In just 87 minutes, Glendining follows the years’ branching paths just far enough to tease us with a glimpse of insight before heading back to the familiar beaten trail.

When she first begins her journey, mostly through Facebook groups, a particular doctor’s name keeps coming up. He specializes in surgeries designed for people with Glendining’s body type. When she initially interviews him, he provides clinical information, then uses the same call to backdoor a sales pitch for his procedure. At the end of the doc, she’s able to meet him in person. There, the complicated question of socialized ableism and consent—where parents are asked whether they’ll subject their toddlers to procedures with substantial risks and long recoveries—is lightly addressed. Will these kids have happier lives post-procedure? More “normal” ones? Is it a question that comes down to the individual, or is there an element of community and culture that should be considered?