Margaret “Mati” Engel in A Still Small Voice (Luke Lorentzen/Abramorama)

Luke Lorentzen’s thoughtful study of coming to terms with mortality follows Margaret “Mati” Engel, a resident chaplain at Manhattan’s Mount Sinai Hospital. She is one of several female chaplains supervised by Rev. David Fleenor. Under the most painful circumstances, these women are tasked to give spiritual care for those who are terminally ill, along with shellshocked and grieving family members. (There’s also the added stress of the then-raging Covid pandemic, affecting hospital personnel, patients, and their families.)

Never making Mati and the other chaplains into saints or miracle workers, Lorentzen instead depicts their chosen road as extremely difficult, but ultimately rewarding. Mati herself questions continuing this line of work, since it is so emotionally fraught and nearly impossible to quantify satisfactorily. Indeed, later in the documentary, Mati asks David if her residency has been successful, and he tells her he doesn’t evaluate on either/or terms. Not convinced, she lays bare her frustrations in the brutally honest way that she speaks throughout the film.

In another meeting between the residents and their supervisor, Mati confesses that she has questioned her faith in God after seeing the unending grief while she’s at work. She also recalls that her grandfather’s first wife and children were killed by the Nazis and her grandmother survived a concentration camp. Unable to articulate her feelings, she simply says, “It’s heavy,” then asks the others—and herself—what seems to be an unanswerable question, “What do you make of this?”

A Still Small Voice is filled with intense, personal scenes, especially those of Mati interacting with patients who are wrestling with their impending morality. An elderly woman with cancer, who is trying to make peace with her diagnosis, eloquently brings up the “still small voice” of the title, a quote from the Old Testament book of Kings. In this context, it refers to the patient’s acknowledgment that she knows she’s nearing that moment of accepting her imminent death.

Lorentzen’s unobtrusive camera mercilessly records interactions that are at times nearly unbearable to watch. It’s reminiscent of Frederick Wiseman’s mammoth, nearly six-hour 1989 film Near Death, which followed the ICU doctors and nurses in a Boston hospital. Lorentzen, like Wiseman, finds the humanity in his subjects just by watching them go about their ordinary but, in some ways, extraordinary lives. In an unforgettable scene, Mati calls a woman whose husband recently died and has a deeply empathetic conversation about her own experience with grief and loss—Mati’s father passed away a few years earlier.

Mati is a sympathetic, willful presence, even when she wears a surgical mask during most of her encounters. Perhaps that’s why Lorentzen inevitably focuses on her piercing dark eyes, whose expressiveness makes her worthy of being the subject of many lengthy close-ups. Mati’s rigorous intelligence and ability to passionately engage with others is something to behold, as in the stirring scene when she, a Jew, performs the Christian rite of baptism on the body of a twin who died in childbirth. The traumatized parents hang on her every word as she tells them that the girl “will remain an eternal teacher” for the couple and their surviving daughter.

Another patient, a woman who already has cancer but soon after admittance to the hospital gets Covid and other ailments, has a firm religious belief that gives her solace. Mati’s very presence also provides her further comfort. She smilingly tells Mati, “Once again, you came on time, Margaret,” crystallizing how Mati’s chosen profession may be the right one, both for her and those she cares for.