“Nine Days” (2021) focuses on Will (Winston Duke), a man at a way station who decides which souls get to be born and experience life over the course of nine days, but unprocessed trauma and an unexpected loss affect his judgment. Edson Oda, a Japanese Brazilian director, makes his directorial debut.
I am a huge Hirokazu Koreeda fan so I recognized that Oda’s premise sounded similar to “After Life” (1998), one of Koreeda’s earlier, less circulated films. It was a turn off, and despite adoring the cast, I decided not to see it in theaters because I knew that I would judge the film harsher than if I had not recognized its similarity. When I finally rented it on Amazon Prime, I liked this film more than expected and rather than a rip off, it feels like an homage, especially since Oda admits to Terrence Malick and Koreeda’s influence on his work, though I think that the visual imagery in “Nine Days” is more accessible though no less poetic than Malick’s work in evoking an emotional response in the audience and telling a character’s complete story without dialogue in a brief amount of time. Oda’s imagery is more accessible because he finds a way to embed it in realism, specifically the viewer’s nostalgia for old technology, tube televisions, VHS players and home movies. Will catalogues a person’s life using vintage technology with the occasional mixed media of projecting that imagery and using three-dimensional junkyard found objects to create an illusion of interacting with that imagery. If this film gets remade in the future, perhaps it will be flat screen televisions, computer screens and smart phones? Somehow the person’s eyes and brain transmit the images wirelessly to this other familiar yet desolate, almost barren, way station. Whereas this technology was contemporary to Koreeda’s film, the technology echoes Will’s sentiment that life is more intense than the world that he and his candidates inhabit so it feels organic that their technology would fall a step behind. They are alive, but on a different plain of existence.
“Nine Days” has a lot of organic momentum because of the premise’s competitive nature and ticking time clock so a viewer will find themselves invested in the outcome. A viewer will find themselves in Will’s shoes as they judge the candidates, but also Will for the criteria that he uses to judge the candidates. As the viewers get to know the candidates and root for them, but they are eliminated, interest is not lost but constantly shifted.
“Nine Days” features an ensemble cast, and without such charismatic and deft actors, I do not think that the story would work. Will has a friend, Kyo (Benedict Wong), and while the film fails at explaining the exact logistical nature of their relationship, their individual experiences and how it intersects with the rules of this dimension, Duke and Wong’s dynamic acts as an emotional bridge over the stories’ holes. Kyo is the cool guy who cosigns that Will is having a bad day to reassure others that he is not as bad as he seems. If Duke did not play Will, I would not like him.
Will is a Nice Guy TM who complains about how he suffered then recreates that suffering by alienating and hurting the people that like him and rewarding people who are probably like the ones who hurt Will when he was alive. I was still sympathetic to Will because of the acting and the writing, which committed the cardinal sin of telling more than showing. Oda’s suffering blindspot is overcome by his ability to convey emotion using all the tools at his disposal. Without those tools, we have a toxic judge who is making life horrible for everyone on Earth and effectively killing nice people. What is the difference between him and the school shooter who fits a certain profile, but is unlike other more long-suffering bullied people who do not lash out at others and rise above it?
Because the cast transmits a lot without being given a lot to explicitly work with—no backstory because the characters are effectively babies though adults play them, you may not notice that “Nine Days” commits a cardinal sin of creating a cast of characters that exist solely to help Will grow as a person and not as independent characters with full lives of their own. Kyo is fun loving, but he only serves as a hype man to reassure us of Will’s pure soul, “Talented, but struggled his whole life to fit into a world different from him.” Emma (Zazie Beetz) feels like a manic pixie dream girl who does not follow the rules and all she wants out of life is to heal Will’s trauma. Emma is less concerned with her existence than Will’s pain, which signals how we as women are expected to act selfless with no concern to our safety when presented with some threatening crap.
Emma explains, “He hates himself. He thinks he’s a failure, and that everything he does is worthless and shameful. And no doubt that he’s experiences so much pain to a point where he felt so much that today just wants to feel nothing. And the numbness, it makes him feel safe now. But I know that it’s really just poisoning what’s left of him.” It is only because Will is a bit of a blank canvas for viewers to project our pain onto that we accept this justification of his bad acts and root for his redemption as a vehicle to feel our own pain and fulfill our desire to be seen and forgiven by those whom we hurt, to still receive sympathy when it is undeserved, to be understood without being condemned though he is not required to make amends or feel any pain once he recognizes the damage that he is inflicted while in pain. Candidates such as Mike (David Rysdahl) or Maria (Arianna Ortiz) represent the parts of Will that he considers inadequate or weak. Alexander (Tony Hale) represents a version of whom Will wishes he could be-a chill, fun loving guy who only enjoys life and is not as easily wounded. Kane (Bill Skarsgard) is Will’s ideal since Will sees life as a war.
Despite its many imperfections, including feeling more like a play in the way that the characters interact, “Nine Days” works because it manages to convey abstract concepts of joy in existing, loss, pain, and death. I generally enjoy Beetz’s acting, but I am uncertain whether I enjoyed her performance. Within a week of watching this film, I discovered that I hate when women characters have a vacant look because I do not understand if the reason for that vacant look. Is it confusion, paralysis, wonder? In Emma’s case, she is a baby, and she is soaking things in, but I am not a fan of blankness because it becomes inscrutable. Hale is a standout.
I recommend “Nine Days” if you are into philosophizing about the nature of life. Is it worth living? Oda answers yes and was inspired to do so in honor of his uncle, who committed suicide.
