Last year I was privileged to see for the first time, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life, a movie about social workers of a kind of limbo conducting souls to their final resting place, recreating their happiest memory for them to dwell in forever after. It’s a mesmerizing piece, beautifully crafted and elegantly told, and certainly one of the most unique interpretations I’ve seen of the hereafter.
That is until I saw Nine Days, late I’ll admit (it was gone from theatres before I could catch it last summer) -a movie that clearly owes a lot to After Life in its’ ideas and creative structure of a world beyond life and death. It’s the feature debut of Edson Oda, a Japanese-Brazilian filmmaker who premiered it at Sundance way back in 2020 (for a barometer of how long ago that was, Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always came out of there that same week); and it may be the most ambitious feature debut from a director in years. Most of that ambition pays off.
Nine Days is set at an isolated house in the middle of a desert where Will (Winston Duke) is an arbiter of what souls are chosen to be given the chance of life. After each choice, he is then able to watch their lives progress in real time over the years through a series of TV screens in his sitting room. When one woman, a professional violinist, unexpectedly dies, he has a vacancy to fill -but is also left stunned by the very fact of her death, given how much potential she had.
The way this context and these rules are communicated through the early parts of the movie is quite graceful. It doesn’t take much to gather the supernatural insinuations from the stark, minimalist atmosphere, a place and mood that cannot possibly be earthly, much as it may resemble identifiable artifice. Will also has a single companion who in contrast to himself has never been alive, but has learned a lot through observation. Kyo (Benedict Wong) helps facilitate the films’ world and ideas, in addition to being a fun and compelling foil for Will, who is generally dour and serious, especially due to the death of Amanda.
Coming out of the ether then are new souls whom Will conducts interviews with, selecting five candidates to go through the standard nine day process of application, in which they watch the footage of Will’s other souls, learn about the world and humanity, and answer harsh questions and moral hypotheticals. It very much is designed like a reality television program, where Will gradually whittles down his options. He is particularly stumped though by one soul whom he names Emma (Zazie Beetz) -who for one requests choosing her own name, and she does herself pick Emma but no other candidate shows that autonomy. She’s notably more ethically curious than anyone else too, when presented with absolutes she dodges. Poised with a scenario where a man is threatening to kill her child, she recognizes that of the two options given her, either would result in the same outcome -and instead asks why the man would do that. Will answers that he’s a bad man, but Emma continues the line -why? Her unusual fascination with Will and her ways of thinking about humanity endear her quickly to Kyo, who secretly grants her a few more freedoms around the house, namely allowing her to witness what happens when a soul is rejected: Will creates for them a makeshift simulation of their favourite human experience that they can enjoy before they fade from existence.
Once again this is a concept seemingly borrowed specifically from After Life, right down to the crude ways in which the experience is realized -wind machines and projector screens and headsets to play music or natural sounds (the technology available to Will seems to reside in the 90s -the lives of all his souls are recorded on VHS tapes -complete with the imperfect grain of a home movie). Through this, Emma not only learns about the human experience, but detects the lingering humanity still there in Will. It becomes about his resigned pessimism versus her stirring optimism, and though he is the one who has actually been there, we’re inclined more towards her point of view, which takes note of things he doesn’t consider and expresses interest in greater depth. Their dynamic spurs glimpses of what he values in this work and in his own history. She asks him for a memory of what it felt like to be alive and he ultimately shares one of reciting a monologue for a theatre class.
None of the insights here are particularly original, the film has that stop-and-smell-the-roses/remember the little joys attitude about life. But it’s the way that Oda makes his point explicitly clear by juxtaposing this with other ideologies on life and human nature. Alex (Tony Hale) is drawn to a stand-up comedian in one of the lives he watches, and shortly adopts an attitude of apathetic dissonance from serious matters and scenarios. And Kane (Bill Skarsgård), bothered by a teen being harassed by bullies who doesn’t stand up for himself, develops a kind of violent nihilism, only seeing the bad in life. There’s a wonderful scene around a dinner, where the remaining figures present share gross-out stories they’ve witnessed, Kyo very enthusiastically telling one about vomiting in a car. Kane however follows it with a disturbing news story involving murder and paedophilia -something which he found “disgusting”. It’s all he’s learned: that the world is a cruel, miserable, horrific place and life is likewise so. His parallel in Emma though counters with a story as gross as Kyo’s but bathed in a context of love that makes it funny -and it has an effect on Kane. Also Will.
These meditations on the meaning of life, its’ beauty and harshness in equal measure, go hand in hand with Will’s personal crisis, and Winston Duke gives his best performance in grappling with it. He learns that Amanda had committed suicide, and even seeing the world through her eyes he couldn’t understand why. He had connected with her more than any of his other souls, saw some of himself in her -she’d even remembered him enough to draw him one time during her early childhood. Her death shakes him right at the moment where he needed assurance of life’s value the most. In providing this, Zazie Beetz too gives an exemplary performance, so full of intelligence and yearning, while Benedict Wong is also dynamite as Will’s conscience figure and subtly a tragic character himself.
He also provides the movie its’ best humour, where it needs to break from the bleakness and existential musing. The film is in fact quite funny and light in moments, Oda definitely takes advantage of where the premise can be silly. But his sincerity never wanes, his direction maintains a solid remarkable sensitivity to craft -it’s not the most astonishing movie of 2021 but there’s a lot of greatness in there, a lot of clever and exciting creative ideas in the visual choices and editing, heavy thought in the cinematography. And it closes on I’ve gotta say one of the most fulfilling and moving endings of the year.
In the grand scheme of things I don’t know that Nine Days says anything particularly new about life and existence, but then neither did Pixar’s Soul and that didn’t stop it from being profound in its own way. In the smart fashion that it says what it needs to and the manner in which it feels so enamoured with its own curiosities the movie just resonates deeply. Certainly the emotion that went into its’ creation came through, inspired by the death of Oda’s uncle -similar to that of Amanda, and his own process of finding meaning in that. I hope that Nine Days is that catharsis for others that it was for Oda. And I hope that in that loss and this healing, it is the beginning of an illustrious career for a soulful artist primed to be one of the next greats.
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