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Some films are perfect for winding down on a Friday night. They’re brainless and fun—and they’ll make you laugh through your end-of-week exhaustion. Others, however, take more thought and effort—challenging films that make you want to go back and watch again—like the Sundance favorite Nine Days.
Nine Days analyzes life and humanity with Will (Winston Duke), a reclusive man whose job is to decide which souls deserve to be born into the world. Every day, he watches the lives of those he’s chosen, taking notes and making observations. When one of them dies unexpectedly, he’s forced to go through the process of interviewing new souls to choose a replacement, all while trying to figure out how this other life could have ended too soon. And as he works with the hopeful souls, one of them makes him consider his own experiences and question his choices.
There are so many lives and stories at play throughout the film. It may revolve around Will and his search for a new life, but as he interviews the souls hoping to be born and spends the rest of the time observing those who have been chosen, we see all of these different lives and different characters. From the moment the souls arrive for their first interview, their personalities come through. You can picture the kind of person that each one would become. But it’s Emma (Zazie Beetz) who steals the show—who questions everything, who doesn’t answer interview questions as expected, who seems to think outside herself and the process.
The concept here isn’t necessarily easy to wrap your head around: a formerly-living man interviewing fully-formed personalities, seemingly in adult human form, who hope to be chosen to be born into the world—knowing that, if they’re not chosen, they’ll simply cease to exist. That’s part of the challenge of the film—just trying to figure out what it’s all supposed to mean. Admittedly, the idea may sound a bit pretentious. But nothing here really feels pretentious. As you become engrossed in the story, it’ll help you let go of some of the doubts and the skepticism that may hold you back in the beginning—and you’ll find yourself caught up in the drama and the beauty and the questions that it will leave with you when it’s over.
Nine Days definitely isn’t a casual Friday night film—and it isn’t for everyone. It’s quiet and deliberate yet absolutely mesmerizing—the kind of film that you’ll wrestle with during and after viewing, that you’ll need to watch more than once in order to get a better feel for this fascinating film and what it has to say.
Listen to the full review on Reel Discovery:
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