Nine Days

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"Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,

You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the specters in books,

You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,

You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self." -- Song of Myself, Walt Whitman

General Summary (No Spoilers)

Nine Days is a brilliantly imagined allegory about life, where four unborn souls (Zazie Beetz, Bill Skarsgard, David Rysdahl, and Tony Hale) compete to be selected by Winston Duke for the opportunity at life. Ethereal, poignant, and at times funny, each soul represents an archetype of humanity. Some may find the pacing slow, but it’s not a TSA line kind of slow, more of a quiet walk along the American River at dawn with the fog masking our real lives and showing us beauty that can only be seen if softly quitted. A perfect movie for a rainy Sunday.

Detailed Summary (Spoilers)

In this imagining of the other life (neither just the after life, but also the before life), souls take shape and self-actualize out of the fog that surrounds a single farm house, the home of Will (Winston Duke) the arbiter of fate for the four unborn souls that walk out of the fog to introduce themselves to us and Will. The set was built on the Utah Salt Plains, providing a backdrop of beauty and harshness, two themes that drift through the film like the mist the souls dissolve back into if not chosen.

We realize early on that Will can watch the lives of previously chosen souls through a series of TV consoles, one of which (Amanda, a violin prodigy) dies unexpectedly in what appears to be a suicide. Kyo, Benedict Wong as a soul never born, operates as a sort of supervisor/companion to Will and tries to convince Will that he heard breaks before the crash, implying that Amanda's death was not intentional.

As the souls introduce themselves we learn they will maintain their formed personalities (the archetypes) when and if born, but retain no memory of the Other Life. By contrast, Will, once born, remembers his life on Earth and all of the pain and loneliness that was his fate while alive and now, after his death, this flavors his interactions with the new souls he interviews.

Brilliantly acted though at times necessarily two-dimensional (as the souls have never experienced the extremes of human emotions, but exist in a serotonin reuptake inhibiting monotone of the non-born), the archetypes include:

The desperately cavalier Tony Hale as Alex, hiding his hunger to be born behind humor and nonchalance. Tony shows his incredible range as an actor by letting that desperation show only through his eyes as he cavalierly exchanges barbs with Will.

Mike (David Rysdahl) is a debilitatingly sensitive soul that is dismissed early from the competition for being too fearful (and as a result, the least realized archetype).

Bill Skarsgard's Kane is confident if not ruthless in his ability to ignore the suffering of others in order to achieve his goal of being selected, which he eventually is to Kyo's dismay.

It is Emma (Zazie Beetz) that Will is most drawn to (and whom Kyo insists is the right choice) because of her natural curiosity about not only her potential life as a born soul, but Will's experiences while born. Zazie is intelligent, curious, enthusiastic and ultimately not chosen because Will fears she too would bear the same level of pain he does when she returns to the Other Life.

When souls are dismissed, Will offers them the "near experience" of their favorite scene from the TV consoles and lives of the born that were chosen previously. Emma refuses the gesture and we watch as she walks across the Salt Plains of Utah into the sunset, the ethereal fog conspicuously missing from the scene.

Nine days is the feature debut of writer and director Edson Oda, a Brazilian that moved to Los Angeles to pursue filmmaking in 2012, earning his masters at USC School of Cinematic Arts but was unmotivated to write until he asked himself, "If I could make just one movie in my entire life, what would that movie be?"

An exploration of how real loss is both a burden and a gift, the movie is inspired by the real death of his uncle at 50 by suicide when Oda was 12 years old. Released in 2021, the film cost ten million dollars and was shot over a period of one month in a warehouse and on the set farm house set built on the Salt Plains of Utah.

I strongly recommend Nine Days and give it 5 out of 5 stars.