365 Days: the Netflix softcore porn film that people can't stop watching
You have to feel a little sorry for Bong Joon-ho. Back in February, when Parasite swept the board at the Oscars, it felt like he was the new flag bearer for foreign language cinema. However, in terms of sheer popular appeal, Parasite has been blown out of the water by a small Polish film called 365 Days. Maybe in the days and weeks to come, Bong will look back and regret not making his film a dreadful straight-to-DVD thriller about semiconsensual blowjobs.
Because that’s what 365 Days is. Touted as the Polish 50 Shades of Grey (and also based on a hit book), it is currently the fourth most-watched thing on Netflix UK and the third most-watched on Netflix US (it’s been near the top of both charts now for two weeks). It is the story of a mob boss who kidnaps, drugs, chokes and all but rapes a stranger for a year in the mad hope that she will fall in love with him. And it is also terrible.
Clearly, objectively terrible. The film currently has a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The Times UK said: “It makes the bonking puppets in Team America: World Police look like straight-faced documentary.” Variety called it “dumber-than-hair”. Cosmopolitan labelled it “the worst thing I’ve ever seen”. This, I hope you will understand, is a bad film. It is bad in concept. It is bad in execution. There is a theory that 365 Days is enjoying so much success at the moment because lockdown has made everyone incredibly horny. That said, if you have to look to dodgy east European Netflix softcore B-movies to get your kicks, you probably deserve to die of frustration.
Honestly, it’s hard to know where to start. There’s the central conceit, designed to be a riff on Beauty and the Beast, albeit one where Beast attempts to demonstrate his worth by tying Belle to a bed and forcing her to watch the teapot character suck him off. There’s the way that the kidnapped woman’s character development is expressed solely through the medium of shopping montages (there are three of them). There’s the dismal dialogue, like the moment where the woman pouts: “I’m not a bag of potatoes that you can transport without permission.” There’s the part where she does eventually fall in love with her kidnapper, but only after he pushes her off a yacht during a screaming argument about how frigid she is, then demonstrates his innate kindness by eventually stopping her from drowning.
Then there’s all the sex, which is by far the biggest failing of 365 Days. Because, despite enjoying a pair of ridiculously photogenic leads, this is easily the least sexy screen sex since you saw Tommy Wiseau’s buttocks pumping away in The Room. On paper, the sex here is at least quite varied. There is masturbation. There is window-pressing. There is cucking, spitting, non-consensual licking, erotic consumption of ice cream, berserk multiposition drone-shot yacht intercourse, and a scene of such aggressively gaggy fellatio that the recipient ends up licking the overhead luggage compartment of an aeroplane at the point of climax.
And yet, it very quickly becomes monotonous. The kidnapper will get a look in his eye, and your heart will sink because you know it means you’re in for yet another few minutes of drably shot semi-resisted sex accompanied – without fail – by a song that sounds as if it has been written for the exclusive purpose of soundtracking a local commercial for a vaguely noxious offbrand aftershave called something like Mutiny or Heretic or Insubordination. You know that feeling of dread you get during musicals, where the plot screeches to a halt so that some ninny can sing about their feelings? That’s how you’ll feel about the sex scenes in 365 Days.
I don’t have any qualms about spoiling 365 Days for you, because nobody on the entire face of the planet has watched this for its storyline; it is a film aimed squarely at a very specific sliver of horny people who are smart enough to sign up for a Netflix account but too dumb to be able to type the word Pornhub on to the internet. So here goes: the plan works. After 365 days, the woman falls in love with her kidnapper. They get engaged and she gets pregnant. But then she dies at the end, offed by another mob gang driven to unthinkable violence because they also couldn’t have sex with her. So, despite everything, at least 365 Days has a moral: sometimes, on reflection, kidnapping a woman and holding her hostage for a year in a sex dungeon doesn’t always have the happy ending you’d expect.