In March 2024, John Barnett — a former Boeing quality-control manager who had spent years warning anyone who would listen that the company's pursuit of profit was being written in the margins of safety — was found dead in a Charleston, South Carolina hotel room, a self-inflicted gunshot wound ruled the cause, while his own deposition in a whistleblower lawsuit sat unfinished on the table. It is with this image, at once banal and devastating, that director Rory Kennedy opens Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing, her urgent and necessary sequel to the 2022 documentary Downfall. The earlier film had traced how a culture of financial pressure over engineering rigour contributed to two catastrophic crashes within five months of each other: Lion Air Flight 610, which fell into the Java Sea in October 2018 with 189 people on board, and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, which plunged into the earth outside Addis Ababa in March 2019, killing 157 more. Together, they erased 346 lives.

Kennedy's new film argues, with accumulating and uncomfortable force, that the reckoning promised by the US Federal Aviation Administration's 2020 decision to lift the grounding of the 737 Max was, in practice, little more than paperwork. The film's most arresting voices belong to those closest to the wreckage, in every sense. Naoise Connolly Ryan, who lost her husband Michael on Flight 302 and has since become an unrelenting advocate for victims' families, carries a grief that the camera renders without sentimentality. Equally chilling is anonymously filmed footage from Boeing's South Carolina Dreamliner plant, where workers confide — with a matter-of-factness that is somehow worse than outrage — that no incentive on earth would persuade them to board the aircraft they build.

What Freefall ultimately refuses to offer is the comfort of a conclusion.