They say the best design is invisible: You’re meant to marvel at the thing, or the feelings the thing inspires in you, not the metaphorical levers and pulleys that give the thing its unique thingness. That maxim applies to just about anything – web design, a cinematic tracking shot, or a metaphysical premise like the one that steers Nine Days along its ruminative, lyrical, sometimes maddening course.
The setup is deceptively simple: A man named Will (Duke) is interviewing a group of candidates for a single vacancy. First-time writer/director Edson Oda borrows the dry language of a job recruiter staffing an open position, which is technically what is happening here – only the candidates are souls, given brief corporeal form during this nine-days-long selection process. They are vying to be born into a human body. Only one of them will be chosen; the others will cease to exist. The soul granted life will join others selected by Will. He will keep tabs on this life, with a kind of tender distraction, watching it unspool along with all his other selections’ lives on a wall of cathode ray tube TV sets, jotting notes about their progress, and taking a paternal pleasure in their weddings, recitals, and other milestones.
I spent much of Nine Days trying to quiet questions about the mechanics of this way station straddling pre-life and after-death. Here’s one that gnawed at me: Why does Will – who had a life on Earth before he became an interviewer – speak of one person’s death as final, when his own experience proves otherwise? Or this: How does Oda explain these brand-new souls’ sophisticated grasp of idiom and sarcasm – is that not learned behavior? But learned where? One soul, a layabout played with an amusing bite by Tony Hale (Arrested Development), makes a passing remark about learning “the lay of the land”; in his four hours of existence, wherever did he pick up that particular turn of phrase? I’ve got another dozen questions, but at the risk of spoiling the film’s gentle mysteries, I’ll stop there. Still: It made me wonder how sturdy the framework of Oda’s story really was – if the design work was in fact not invisible, just missing large gaps.
Ultimately, the levers and pulleys are not what interest Oda, who took home the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for the picture at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, or the towering Duke (Black Panther, Us), who tautens his physical heft into a performance of exquisite stillness. Instead, they use the supernatural premise to reflect on earthbound concerns: what it means to be human, what kind of constitution is best suited to survive being human. (Oda has said the film was inspired by the suicide of a family member.) “Life is pain,” I scribbled at one point in my notepad, which pretty much sums up Will’s philosophy, at least during this particular nine days, as he’s mourning the sudden death of one of his previous selections. That some souls get vaporized just because Will is having a bad week feels rather unjust to me; I couldn’t say for sure if that was the point … and there I go again, chasing clarity, clean lines, and hard corners. Perhaps I am the one who is not constitutionally suited to this movie.
In fact, I liked wrestling with Nine Days, liked feeling the act of moviewatching as an active, not passive, one, and the way Antonio Pinto’s strings-forward score nudged my brain to stop churning long enough for pure emotion to kick in. Here’s another something that’s been niggling at me: In these pages last week, I gave the same star rating to Jungle Cruise, a regurgitated bit of disposable entertainment for which I opened my baby beak and happily swallowed. How do I square that circle? How can I put Jungle Cruise’s bombast on the same plane as Nine Days, a movie that in fits made me cry and crackle like static electricity? But then I remembered the words of Walt Whitman, who cameos here in the film’s gasping last minutes, and in Duke’s future Oscar reel: I contain multitudes. And that fact of humanity, I feel certain, is at least some of the point.
This article appears in August 6 • 2021.
