Nine Days

The title Nine Days makes me think of a cat's nine lives or Beethoven's ninth-symphonic celebration of life. Anyhow, the Brazilian-born, US-based writer director Edson Oda has a terrific Terrance-Malick-like ode to life with an imaginative sci-fi indie that takes us to where no artist has ever gone.

Somewhere in a limbo-like desert a few souls not yet born but in human form try out in front of Will (Winston Duke), who will decide which one deserves to be human. Among them are a sybarite Alexander (Tony Hale), a perpetually-feeling-victimized candidate, Mike (David Rysdahl), and a rationalist (Bill Skarsgard). Best of all is the free spirit Emma (Zazie Beetz), whom Will can't understand until later on in the days.

Although they are learning about "real life" from multiple TV monitors from earth private lives, what they learn in these nine testing days is all they need to know about what it means to be human. Will's baggage from real life is instructive about the vicissitudes of life and the attendant longing for permanent love.

Because the candidates are regularly asked to document the grace moments of their short lives (e.g., laughing with someone, letting sand sift through fingers), they provide us with the paradigm for a happy life: enjoy the small things. Oda even uses Whitman's lyrical celebration of himself to capture this carpe diem attitude.

As I left the theater in high spirits, I was ultra-happy to have won a spot in life thinking how difficult Oda made candidacy for his purgatory-like suffering souls. I celebrated the small things of life as well as myself.

Nine Days is an inspirational film with enough suspense and new ideas to satisfy a wide spectrum of audiences.

See it and love life. At Gateway and several theaters.

I may have ultimately found this somewhat more intellectually stimulating than emotionally, regarding the many philosophical and moral paths and implications that go into what one does in a life and how one regards violence and being violence or passive and of course what creativity brings about. The filmmaker Edson Oda - first feature as a writer-director and by itself that makes this a pretty major achievement to me - pulls off that tricky thing pretty well of exploring the ideas of simply living a "good" life or being a person wrought with inner pain and anguish (and what hiding that does to those who care about them) without falling into pedantry - in brief, it tackles empathy by putting it through the characters' perspectives. He provides a captivating backdrop, spare but interesting, without over explaining the mechanics of how these subjects are right at this place

There is an obvious point that is a flaw which is just how exceptional and perceptive Zazie Beets is (like once she's there game over you know). Buy Winston Duke is great at channeling a lot of preprinted thoughts and feelings, sometimes so explosively it could go the other way and not work but he always holds it together, and it is a surprisingly moving moment when he just talks about when his character was alive and performing a monologue he had to memorize last minute... to that end Walt Whitman (or at least his seminal work) makes an appearance!

I desperately wanted to connect with this movie. The premise was so interesting and I knew that if done right it had the p[potential to be extremely powerful and tug at the heart-strings. It also had the potential to make you question the value of your existence. Unfortunately it did none of those things for me. I just couldn't connect with it. I kept waiting for it to find its rhythm and it just never did.

The film is well made. It's beautifully shot, there's some great dialogue and the acting is great. It can't be faulted in those ways. But none of that matters if you can't connect with your audience. When you read the synopsis for this film you know is going to be a unique and daring experience. Films like this take risks and even if they don't pay off they have to be admired.

I can't personally recommend this film because it was not for me. That's not to say that you won't find something in it though. In fact I'd love it if others could find in this film what I could not. Maybe I'll watch this film 10-15 years from now and find what I missed first time around. 5/10.

This really rubbed me up the wrong way, on a matter of principle, because it's just too close to its source material, while adding nothing. This is 'After Life' by Kore-eda, my favourite film, only this 'visionary director' inversed the premise. Which ultimately makes little difference, it's still an exploration of what constitutes a meaningful existence on this earth.

It's beyond homage. Masquerading and marketing such plagiarism as a breathtakingly unique, original indie film (and fooling the press) is so much more insidious to me than the inevitably over-schmaltzified remake once-proposed in the 00s.

'Nine Days' takes the setup, the tone, the limbo setting, the bureaucratic elements, the interviews, the metaphysical questions, the down-to-earth quality, even the analogue VHS tapes and lovingly-crafted staged sendoffs. Even the minor plot developments were tonally the same. Zazie Beets and Benedict Wong are great, but performances become overwrought towards the end. The cinematography is beautiful. Yet in every aspect of actually feeling something, this pales in comparison to After Life. Much like when a knockoff design company changes a couple of small things on the product it's copying to avoid a lawsuit, but the final product isn't nearly as good as the original, this film doesn't provide anything approaching the quiet emotional resonance After Life does, instead descending into overwritten quasi-philosophical discussions which left me cold.

I don't mean to take the experience away from those who found it meaningful but it angered me most because I love cinema, I love unique voices, and I can't stand lauded frauds. When this guy's taking the Marvel money in a couple of years' time, Kore-eda will still be evolving his genuinely-authentic craft.

After seeing this movie at Sundance, I made my way up to the stage so that I could shake Edson Oda's hand. I had to do it because I felt like I was going up to shake Orson Welles's hand after watching "Citizen Kane." I told him I had watched movies all my life and I believed this was the best movie I had ever seen. He looked shocked by that comment but thanked me. He hasn't been around long enough to be arrogant and condescending, I guess. Obviously, Nine Days strikes different people differently. I enthusiastically encourage you to see this movie to find out how it strikes you and I can only hope you have the exquisite experience it was for me. I am absolutely certain that Mr. Oda has created a masterpiece that will be much more highly respected in the future. I can hardly wait to see his future creations but, if he never makes another, he will have accomplished a life's work with this one.