Review: ‘Nine Days’ Scantly Assesses the Value Assigned to Living
“You are being considered for the amazing opportunity of life.”
In the liminal space of Utah’s salt flats, a single, craftsman style house resides in existential limbo. Inside, a fastidious tenant named Will (Winston Duke) monitors two dozen CRT televisions stacked atop each other, each one televising the POV of one person’s life on Earth. Will writes down what he sees, tapes the day’s events on a VHS, and files both records under the corresponding individual’s folder, repeating this process for every life he monitors and for every day of their lives.
Vicariously and voyeuristically, Will comes to know what it means to live. After all, he spends his entire life committed to its documentation. That knowledge, along with having previously lived on Earth himself, makes him an apt individual to afford life. When one television goes dark from an individual’s untimely death, a replacement birth is allocated to a batch of competing souls all vying for the opportunity of life. It is Will’s job to choose one of them over the course of nine days to receive such a consequential gift.
The set up of Edson Oda’s original screenplay and directorial debut is one that readily conjures existential themes, a rich and common cinematic thesis that many films have tried their hand at, both succeeding and failing. Hailing from the world of advertisements and stepping onto the cinematic stage, Oda’s approach is a sentimental one. From the onset, it is a losing game for all but one of these souls. The idea that life is fleeting is inherently baked into the premise. What follows is a labor of extracting something profound beyond what is already given, and what materializes is perhaps a reenforcement of what most of us already know: to live everyday means to value every second.
If we didn’t know, our varied candidates — played namely by Zazie Beats, Bill Skarsgård, Tony Hale, and Arianna Ortiz — help us bear witness to such sentiments. With each passing day, the candidates are whittled down, eliminated for one reason or another, and as a parting gift, Will grants them the opportunity to relive their favorite memory. Those memories are limited, but often found in what they have observed on Will’s television sets. One contestant chooses to visit the beach, a space Will recreates with a wooden sandbox, a small pool, and headphones playing coastal sounds. Another asks to take a bike ride through the city, recreated with a stationary bike surrounded by sheet walls lit with rear projection. In these moments, Oda leans into the sensation of living as a means of underscoring his intent.
Oda emphasizes the act of living, often speechless and to the tune of a sentimental violin. Candidates are shown with great glee experiencing a moment commonplace in our daily lives, but one we might not always appreciate. POV images on Will’s television sets follow a similar pattern; as Will and the candidates watch others live, the remedial nature of what they see becomes a desire they hope to experience themselves, a sentiment that spurs an appreciation for their own gift of life on the viewer’s end. Unfortunately, this formula of wishful longing can only last for so long. With surface level assessment, we are inundated with one note images of living, a procession of curled feet in sand, faces of childlike wonder, and assorted sensational mundanities. The culminating effect is a scant assessment of the value assigned to living.
—
