I think my biggest regret when I decided to skip going to the theaters again during the Delta variant was missing Nine Days. I kept seeing the trailers before various movies, and it looked awesome. Something about some sort of other plane where a professorial-looking man played by Winston Duke interviews various people to determine…something really got my attention. Interesting cast, mysterious premise, really, this was my sort of thing. But, it was also the sort of movie that would only be at the local AMC for one weekend, and I opted not to go until things calmed down again.

But this weekend, for my birthday, I caught up with two movies from this past year I wished I saw in theaters. First was Nobody, and then came Nine Days. Both were worth the wait.

Will (Duke) is first seen watching various TVs and making notes on what he sees. He seems to be following multiple people through their own eyes as they live their day-to-day lives. He seems to live in a small house in the middle of nowhere, and his technology seems to be a wee bit outdated in the form of VCRs and VHS recordings and, later on, Polaroid cameras. Will’s only real company is Kyo (Benedict Wong), a jovial fellow who sometimes comes over to watch some of the people going through their lives. Will seems to be particularly interested in Amanda, a violin prodigy in her late twenties. But then, for no clear reason, Amanda dies. Will now has a new job. He needs to interview various, for lack of a better word, souls to see who will be born and become human. Of the various candidates, only one will go on to be human and live. The rest will simply fade from existence. The entire process will be done within nine days.

However, there are a few flies in the ointment. Most notably, Will himself is obsessed with Amanda’s death, wanting to know why she died. He is also the only person involved in this long process who was once human and alive himself. Kyo never went on to that, and the various souls were only just created. Will presents himself as somewhat stoic, and his tests seem to be asking the souls how they would react in various hypothetical situations, all using names he has given these potential people. But then along comes one more, Emma (Zazie Beetz). She’s a cheerful individual inclined to question everything, the only one to object to the name Will gave her until she then chooses that name herself all the same. Kyo takes a shine to her immediately, but Emma, for her part, is more inclined to learn more about Will. Can something snap Will out of his funk, and which soul will go on to life?

I suspected I was going to love this one, and I certainly did. Will’s tests mostly involve having the candidates watch his various previous picks and seeing how they react, and when he does decline to choose someone, he gives them a moment of compassion. That said, he isn’t an emotionally expressive man, and it is hard to say what he’s looking for in a new soul. Many of the candidates don’t seem to get past the initial interview, but of the rest, there’s some rather vivid characterization for a lot of them. Mike (David Rysdahl) is very introverted and shy to a painful degree. Maria (Arianna Ortiz) has a quiet curiosity about the world. Alexander (Tony Hale) is more of a comic relief character who may not be taking the process all that seriously while Kane (Bill Skarsgard) is a bit of a pessimist who wants to fight the wrongs of the world. But really, this is about Will and how Emma might be trying to get through to him if not to the next world.

Essentially, this is a movie about the joy of living in small ways. Why does Will choose who he does? Arguably, his final choice is reflected by his mood, but he does learn something about himself during the process. What he went through to make him the way he is and how he was chosen to be an arbiter is never really explained, but it doesn’t really matter. Movies like this remind me of works like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind that get me thinking about how film can represent ideas beyond the sort that other forms of media can’t. Factor in as well a number of beautiful performances from the entire cast, especially from Duke and Beetz, and even if I didn’t see it in a theater, I could at least see it on my HD TV set, and that was almost as good. Check this one out.

Grade: A


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