Film Life in isolation
Shane Danielsen on ‘Nine Days’ and ‘Bo Burnham: Inside’
a Craftsman house sits in the middle of a vast salt flat ringed by mountains. Inside, in a dark room filled with old cathode-ray television sets, is Will (Winston Duke), an official charged with a curious duty: to assess a series of candidates (souls, I suppose, though the word is never uttered here) over the course of nine days, and determine through a series of interviews if they’re worthy of “the amazing opportunity of life”. Which is to say, of being born into the world we know.
If the conceit of Nine Days sounds familiar, that’s because it recalls another, better movie: Hirokazu Kore-eda’s great After Life (1998), which describes more or less the same process, only from the other end. In that film, recently deceased men and women were brought to a facility as low-tech and unremarkable as this one, and given a week to look back on their lives and identify the single memory they wished to carry with them into the titular beyond, which was then faithfully re-created by the facility’s technicians. Indeed, about 40 minutes into Nine Days, writer-director Edson Oda’s debt to Kore-eda becomes overt, as Will and his co-worker Kyo (Benedict Wong) do precisely the same thing, as a weird sort of consolation prize for the rejected candidates. Their practical, homemade staging even mimics that of the earlier film.
Why the televisions? Well, it seems that, once a candidate is selected and born, “interviewers” such as Will then get to watch the totality of their earthly lives – a detail that, frankly, gave me the creeps. And this he does, assiduously taking notes all the while, though the unexpected suicide of one of his favourites, a violinist and former child prodigy called Amanda, unmoors him so comprehensively that his judgement begins to waver – a problem further