Although arguably a smidge too ponderous and self-serious for its own good, Nine Days still represents a reasonably promising debut for its writer-director Edson Oda. This Brazilian-Japanese film-maker, who comes out of the world of advertising and developed this through the Sundance Lab (not always a great sign to be honest) has crafted a visually striking work that blends metaphysics, moral philosophy and melodrama into a potent movie cocktail. The result is flavoursome and distinctive, but probably didn’t need the paper umbrella of grad-school literary grandstanding, a maraschino cherry garnish of sentimentality, and dash-of-absinthe cray-cray.
It was probably sheer accident in terms of core plot device set-up, but Nine Days (which premiered at the Sundance film festival in January 2020), is very similar to Pixar animated feature Soul, which came out at the end of the same year. Like Soul, Nine Days concerns itself with unborn entities, all of whom are hoping to find passage into the world of the living. They will never remember their time in this strange-looking clapboard house filled with TV sets and shabby filing cabinets, a manse eerily sited in the middle of a desert expanse (actually, the Great Salt Lake).
Each soul is processed by celestial bureaucrat Will (Winston Duke) who, unlike his colleague Kyo (the ever welcome Benedict Wong), once actually lived on Earth before landing his current gig. It’s Will’s job to decide which of the entities – played by Bill Skarsgard, Tony Hale, David Rysdahl, Arianna Ortiz and Zazie Beetz – will get to replace one of Will’s favourite earlier placements, a violinist named Amanda who inexplicably killed herself. Assessment consists of interviews where Will asks each candidate to answer a moral conundrum, as well as studying how they react to streaming footage of people living life on Earth.
If they don’t get chosen, they get to choose an earthly moment of any kind to live in that Will and Kyo recreate for them using projectors and props. That concept is similar to one in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 1998 film After Life, where the special-moment recreations were blessings bestowed by heavenly artisans on the newly deceased, rather than the never-born. It all made a lot more sense in Kore-eda’s film, which had an elegant simplicity, warmth and wit that’s mostly absent from Nine Days. That said, After Life didn’t have Duke reciting Walt Whitman like he was auditioning for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, a closing scene both tender, ridiculous and strangely affecting.
• Nine Days is released on 17 December in cinemas.
