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One thing is certain after previewing filmmaker Matthew Thomas Ross’ new creatively liberated documentary, Into the Unknown: Tears will roll.
Ross faced the unknown in 2023 with a rare Stage 4 appendix cancer diagnosis at the age of 38. That’s after an already emotionally trying year that saw his beloved dog die. He also popped the question to his partner on the Oregon Coast after his diagnosis. These moments shared so close to one another put the audience through an emotional gauntlet, though one nowhere near as difficult to run as the film’s director and subject faced.
Throughout Into the Unknown, Ross looks back on his middle-class childhood through early ’90s home movies in which Ross’ love of camerawork began. Audiences may notice how Ross only now is approaching his parents’ ages, with dreams of making it to his 90s like his grandparents.
If none of that gets the waterworks going on Sunday, Dec. 1, at the Hollywood Theatre, viewers likely won’t long resist Into the Unknown’s emotionally erosive soundtrack of cooing vocals over soft acoustic guitar, courtesy of local musicians like Jesse Wells, Mel Guérison, and the band Typhoon—whose lead singer, Kyle Morton, also contributes a song—or the woodwinds and synths arranged by Holland Andrews. While the soundtrack at times feels a bit like the twee Portland of yesteryear, Into the Unknown nevertheless needs no cheap tricks to blast through audiences’ emotional walls.
A commercial and music video director whose credits include Nike, Fender and Sallie Ford, Ross narrates his journey from shortly after his initial diagnosis of Stage 2 appendix cancer to this past August using a similar visual language. The doc’s stylish title card, for instance, zooms in on Ross in bed as a disorienting sea of post-diagnosis voicemails from loved ones washes over him, framing him between two black bars of negative space to establish a feeling of entrapment not just by his prognosis, but also by the real and perceived reactions of well-meaning supporters in his life.
As he learns more about how his new reality, visually translated with surgical animations and snippets of his medical records, Ross returns frequently to his introductory scene in his backyard, where he states his plan to beat the disease with no clue how his life and movie will unfold. It’s a narrative technique that leaves the film feeling like a self-aware creation.
Oregon guest stars throughout Into the Unknown as a metaphor for the natural cycle’s precedence over manmade time, from gentle forest snow and later storms of sakura petals falling on Ross to the Pacific Ocean, which pulls double duty as a metaphor for emotional waves into which Ross submerges, like depression and anxiety. The mix of cameras used (Aaton XTR Super and Bolex H16 Reflex 16 mm cameras, along with Ross’ father’s Sony Handycam from the ’90s, for the camera nerds out there) creates a rich mix of textures from sun-kissed celluloids to gritty lo-fi realism.
Ross hopes viewers never have to live his experiences, but if they do, Into the Unknown is an excellent introduction to living through the emotional toll cancer takes on its patients, told through an extraordinarily tender lens.
He fortunately shows no signs of active cancer today, but Ross now faces four years of quarterly monitoring at Oregon Health & Science University. Just as he frequently returns to what he didn’t know in his introductory statement, Into the Unknown follows Ross as he processes fate as best as he can. The not strictly linear storytelling allows Ross to revisit himself and shows viewers how quickly chemotherapy affects patients, even if they don’t all respond to treatment with the same symptoms, such as hair loss. The information Ross and his care team share on the rising rate of early cancer diagnoses among millennials should be a wake-up call for anyone who’s not yet taking their health as seriously as they should.
Into the Unknown plays like a far gentler, feature-length version of Mark Pellington’s footage collage in the classic Foo Fighters’ music video “Best of You,” a tribute to Pellington’s late wife. While grief features in this documentary, it’s not the star. Ross’ determination to stay himself, even fear-filled and at times resentfully lonely, inspires viewers—without leaning on maudlin clichés—that their lives can be any kind of art project they want, but they get only one take at it, with no guaranteed runtime.
SEE IT: Into the Unknown, not rated, screens at Hollywood Theatre, 4122 NE Sandy Blvd., 503-493-1128, hollywoodtheatre.org. 7:30 pm Sunday, Dec. 1. $12.