NINE DAYS
****
Director: Edson Oda
Screenwriter: Edson Oda
Principal cast:
Winston Duke
Zazie Beetz
Benedict Wong
Tony Hale
David Rysdahl
Bill Skarsgård
Country: USA
Classification: M
Runtime: 124 mins
Australian release date: 11 October 2021 in NSW, other states differ.
Japanese/Brazilian filmmaker Edson Oda has, until Nine Days, devoted himself to making short films, music videos and commercials, so you’ve got to admire his ambition to leap from shorts to this two-hour-plus opus on life, death and the meaning of everything. Working from his own script, which began to percolate in his brain after the suicide of a much-loved uncle, he has made a highly-original movie that examines what it means to be human and considers the value we place on our humanity. It won’t appeal to a mass audience but if you are looking for something fresh and unique and you admire genre-busting directors, then Nine Days is well worth your attention. I guarantee you won’t see another film like it anytime soon.
Will (Winston Duke) is a solitary man who spends his days watching people go about their lives on a bank of old-school televisions sets, which he records on VHS cassettes. Oddly, his POV appears to be inside their heads, so that he sees what they see. His weatherboard cottage stands alone in a desert landscape, his only visitor Kyo (Benedict Wong), a guy who comes by occasionally to watch the action on the TVs. That is, until the day that one of his subjects, a professional violinist who appears to be of special interest to him, suddenly dies in circumstances that rock Will’s world and shatter his assumptions. Not only must he find a replacement life to invest in, he also becomes impassioned about figuring out how he could have missed the signs of impending doom that led to his subject’s death. It transpires that Will is a gatekeeper of sorts, an assessor of souls awaiting human birth. To fill the space that occupied the now dormant TV, he auditions five candidates for the prize of life, a process that will take nine days - at the end of that time, one will be selected for human birth. The contenders are Emma (Zazie Beetz), Kane (Bill Skarsgård), Alexander (Tony Hale), Mike (David Rysdahl) and Maria (Arianna Ortiz), who display various levels of enthusiasm for the selection process, but it is only Emma who makes Will question the fundamental validity of his beliefs and his judgements about what it means to be human.
Leaving aside the boldness of Oda’s metaphysical screenplay, Nine Days is quite a technical achievement, too. Each of the lives we follow on the television sets play like mini films-within-the-film and the scratchy analogue footage serves to keep a distance between those born on Earth and the yet-to-be-born denizens of limbo, the space between death and life that Will and the candidates inhabit. The director also shows great creative flair in the way he has Will and Kyo fashion special memories as ‘gifts’ for some of the contenders. The cast is uniformly excellent, especially Duke and Beetz (although that may be in part because they have the biggest, wordiest roles) and Antonio Pinto’s score is an important addition to the film’s tone, in particular the pieces composed for the violin.
Nine Days caused a sensation when it was first shown at the Sundance Film Festival last year and Oda was awarded the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for his script. It was widely acknowledged that here was a new star in the filmmaking firmament. Whether you ‘get’ Oda’s movie or think it’s all a bit too rarefied, it certainly acts as a mightily impressive calling-card for the writer/director and I can’t wait to see where he goes from here. Judging by this effort, it won’t be anywhere that we’ve been before.
Screenwriter: Edson Oda
Principal cast:
Winston Duke
Zazie Beetz
Benedict Wong
Tony Hale
David Rysdahl
Bill Skarsgård
Country: USA
Classification: M
Runtime: 124 mins
Australian release date: 11 October 2021 in NSW, other states differ.
Japanese/Brazilian filmmaker Edson Oda has, until Nine Days, devoted himself to making short films, music videos and commercials, so you’ve got to admire his ambition to leap from shorts to this two-hour-plus opus on life, death and the meaning of everything. Working from his own script, which began to percolate in his brain after the suicide of a much-loved uncle, he has made a highly-original movie that examines what it means to be human and considers the value we place on our humanity. It won’t appeal to a mass audience but if you are looking for something fresh and unique and you admire genre-busting directors, then Nine Days is well worth your attention. I guarantee you won’t see another film like it anytime soon.
Will (Winston Duke) is a solitary man who spends his days watching people go about their lives on a bank of old-school televisions sets, which he records on VHS cassettes. Oddly, his POV appears to be inside their heads, so that he sees what they see. His weatherboard cottage stands alone in a desert landscape, his only visitor Kyo (Benedict Wong), a guy who comes by occasionally to watch the action on the TVs. That is, until the day that one of his subjects, a professional violinist who appears to be of special interest to him, suddenly dies in circumstances that rock Will’s world and shatter his assumptions. Not only must he find a replacement life to invest in, he also becomes impassioned about figuring out how he could have missed the signs of impending doom that led to his subject’s death. It transpires that Will is a gatekeeper of sorts, an assessor of souls awaiting human birth. To fill the space that occupied the now dormant TV, he auditions five candidates for the prize of life, a process that will take nine days - at the end of that time, one will be selected for human birth. The contenders are Emma (Zazie Beetz), Kane (Bill Skarsgård), Alexander (Tony Hale), Mike (David Rysdahl) and Maria (Arianna Ortiz), who display various levels of enthusiasm for the selection process, but it is only Emma who makes Will question the fundamental validity of his beliefs and his judgements about what it means to be human.
Leaving aside the boldness of Oda’s metaphysical screenplay, Nine Days is quite a technical achievement, too. Each of the lives we follow on the television sets play like mini films-within-the-film and the scratchy analogue footage serves to keep a distance between those born on Earth and the yet-to-be-born denizens of limbo, the space between death and life that Will and the candidates inhabit. The director also shows great creative flair in the way he has Will and Kyo fashion special memories as ‘gifts’ for some of the contenders. The cast is uniformly excellent, especially Duke and Beetz (although that may be in part because they have the biggest, wordiest roles) and Antonio Pinto’s score is an important addition to the film’s tone, in particular the pieces composed for the violin.
Nine Days caused a sensation when it was first shown at the Sundance Film Festival last year and Oda was awarded the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for his script. It was widely acknowledged that here was a new star in the filmmaking firmament. Whether you ‘get’ Oda’s movie or think it’s all a bit too rarefied, it certainly acts as a mightily impressive calling-card for the writer/director and I can’t wait to see where he goes from here. Judging by this effort, it won’t be anywhere that we’ve been before.