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If you didn't know that "Nine Days" was the feature debut of director Edson Oda , you would assume Oda had many films under his belt. He presents his bold vision with confidence (he also wrote the script), and he's courageous enough to have at the center of his first film the eternal issues of the human condition: What does it mean to be alive? How do we appreciate life while we are here? Is it even possible? Oda does not shy away from these crucial questions, and finds a format to address them with a minimum of hokum, and a minimum of New-Age bromides. "Nine Days" got raves when it premiered at Sundance last year. It's such an exciting debut.

There's a moment early on that shows Oda's sensitivity at accumulating small everyday moments in service to the story being told. He grounds the otherworldly world in the familiar. In a small clapboard house, surrounded by forbidding desert, co-workers Will ( Winston Duke ) and Kyo ( Benedict Wong ) watch a video recording of a violin prodigy's concerto, playing on one of the screens in the wall of vintage televisions, each one connected to an old-school rickety VCR. Will and Kyo are dressed up for the concert. Will put on a bowtie. They stand at attention, staring at the small screen. They look like proud fathers.

What this all means becomes clear in the well-crafted opening sequences, with their deliberate pacing, and disinclination to rush or over-explain. Will is in charge of evaluating all unborn souls, choosing which ones get to move on, and enter the world as new life. He puts them through a rigorous nine-day process. Will himself was alive once. He was once "chosen" by a figure just like himself. And so he understands the world, he understands humanity. He comes at this process with a stern and inflexible command. He must choose the most suitable soul. He cannot get too involved. The violin prodigy was one of Will's picks, and he watches over her life on the television screen with almost unbearable emotion. She is "his." He keeps meticulous file folders on all of his "picks," storing away carefully labeled VHS tapes of every moment of their lives.

New candidates walk across the stretch of desert and knock on his door. Played by Tony Hale , Bill Skarsgård , Arianna Ortiz , David Rysdahl and Zazie Beetz , these candidates arrive with different personalities and sensibilities, and diverse attitudes towards the process. Will explains that once they are born on earth, they will forget all that has happened, but "you will still be you" (the implication being that we arrive on this earth with essences already in place). Right before the new batch of candidates show up, Will was horrified at footage of Amanda, the violinist, crashing her car on the way to a concert (the television screen switches to color bars and then goes black). Will cannot understand. He searches his files for a clue to her state of mind. Did he miss something? How could this happen? He takes the loss hard. Meanwhile, he works with each candidate, putting them through their paces. But something is "off" in Will. His equilibrium is shattered. Duke does a wonderful job at establishing Will's normal character so we can instantly perceive that something has changed.

The strength of "Nine Days" is not so much the scenario (although that is imaginative and well-constructed) but the mood Oda sets, the clarity with which he establishes this world, how it operates, its rules and traditions. There is a score by Antonio Pinto but it drops out for long stretches. When music shows up, it has great resonance and power. Oda's script is filled with talk. The scenes are long and often deal in very difficult metaphysical and ethical questions. It's common to hear people repeat, ad nauseum, that "show, not tell" is an important rule. But there are plenty of very "talky" films that are riveting. Rules are made to be broken, and Oda's script does. The actors help in this, approaching the material with vulnerability and intelligence.

Each scene shows the process unfolding. Every detail is important. One of the candidates, Emma (Beetz), is different than the others. She can't play by the rules of Will's questionnaire. She asks questions about his questions. When presented with a hypothetical scenario and asked what she would do, she sometimes says, "I don't know." Unheard of. Will is frustrated by her and yet is strangely drawn to her, too. Beetz, with her transparent face, her beautiful emotional openness, embodies receptivity. She takes it all in. She may be a new soul, but she can't help but look at Will and sense his unfinished business. She asks him why his experience as a living human was so painful, and Will refuses her requests for more information. He shuts the filing cabinet on his own story.

There are other films that stroll into this metaphysical almost spiritual territory, Albert Brooks' " Defending Your Life " perhaps the most obvious example. In "Defending Your Life," the recently-dead are sent to a Purgatory-type resort, where they are judged on whether or not they are ready to "move on," presumably to Heaven. Brooks approached this material with humor, and achieved a profound result. "Nine Days," however, has a yearning bittersweet quality, generated from Will's unhappy awareness of the pain awaiting the unborn souls when they leave his care. There's also the question of whether or not life is worth living, even in the face of all that pain, and the eventuality of death.

Although Kurosawa's " Ikiru " does not have a supernatural or sci-fi element, its concerns are similar. Is it possible to be totally aware of life as you are living it? Does the awareness of death change how we live? We always think we have a little more time. We waste the time we have sweating the small stuff. The famous final scene of "Ikiru" is echoed in "Nine Days," in the moments when Will gives the rejected candidate a chance to experience a moment of life that they've observed on the television screens. Not surprisingly, the candidates choose the fleeting moments, the moments of small sensory joys: riding a bike, playing in the waves. In the final scene of Thornton Wilder's Our Town , Emily, who has been given the chance to re-live one day of her life, cuts the exercise short because it's painful, life moves by too quickly. When she says goodbye to the earth, it's the small everyday things she will miss:

"Goodbye to clocks ticking ... and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths ... and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it—every, every minute?"

This is the territory "Nine Days" inhabits. It's daunting territory and the pitfalls—of sentimentality, of over-simplification, of pushed emotions accompanied by sweeping strings—are everywhere. "Nine Days" doesn't avoid all those pitfalls. There are a couple of moments that feel not so much pushed as over-determined. Will's journey—and Emma's pushing of Will to open up about his pain—trembles on the brink of a cliché, like the moment Robin Williams makes Matt Damon cry in " Good Will Hunting ." However, Oda's touch is extremely controlled, and the actors are so connected to what they are doing, that the film doesn't feel manipulative. The catharsis, when it comes, is exhilarating.

It's easy to sweep an audience away with emotion. What is not so easy is to create a film that asks Emily's question: "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?" and ask it honestly. "Nine Days" not only asks the question over and over, but allows space for the answer to reveal itself.

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Sheila O'Malley

Sheila O'Malley received a BFA in Theatre from the University of Rhode Island and a Master's in Acting from the Actors Studio MFA Program. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film credits.

Nine Days (2021)

124 minutes

Winston Duke as Will

Zazie Beetz as Emma

Bill Skarsgård as Kane

Benedict Wong as Kyo

Tony Hale as Alexander

David Rysdahl

Geraldine Hughes as Colleen

Arianna Ortiz as Maria

Perry Smith as Anne

John Forker

Cinematographer

Wyatt Garfield
Jeff Betancourt
Michael Taylor
Antonio Pinto

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‘Nine Days’ Review: Belief in the Beforelife

In this drama featuring Winston Duke and Zazie Beetz, unborn souls are given a chance at life on Earth.

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By Glenn Kenny

“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness,” wrote Vladimir Nabokov. We have been imagining and describing one of those ostensible eternities — the afterlife — for millenniums. “Nine Days,” the ambitious and often impressive debut feature from the writer-director Edson Oda, surprises by positing a prelife world, and a vetting process determining which souls are awarded a term on earth.

In a small house in the middle of a desert, a stocky, quiet man named Will (Winston Duke) watches a bank of tube TVs, recording their feeds on VHS cassettes. These POVs show the lives of the people he’s “passed.”

Just as he’s meeting, one by one, a new group of individuals to assess, one of his people in the world ends their life, which shakes Will to the core. He gets obsessed over why. Will this affect his ability to look at his new charges with fairness?

“Nine Days” is more about questions than answers. It’s not an overtly political film, in any sense. Will’s screens don’t seem to depict any human beings who aren’t at least in the vicinity of the middle class. When Will is pitching his candidates on his process, he tells them of “the amazing opportunity of life,” and that if they pass they will be “born in a fruitful environment.” But later Will blurts out some thoughts to his friend and neighbor Kyo (Benedict Wong) suggesting Will believes himself something of a con man.

The candidates are, arguably, stock characters with some sensitively added value. Alexander (Tony Hale) just wants to have beers and hang out. When he learns that Will himself once lived on earth — the film’s realm encompasses souls both “passed” and those never born — he can’t figure out why Will is reluctant. We know that Emma (Zazie Beetz) is going to be a special kind of free spirit by the insouciance she displays when showing up late for her first appointment.

Oda is a very assured and sometimes inspired filmmaker, and he handles his actors beautifully. Duke and Beetz in particular deliver performances for the ages. And the movie’s inquiries, about ethics, morality, consciousness and the ability to hang on in this brief crack of light we’re sharing at the moment, are pertinent. But the narrative conceits of “Nine Days,” while exquisitely constructed, are intricate to the point of laborious. At times the movie almost sinks under their weight.

Nine Days Rated R for language and themes. Running time 2 hours 4 minutes. In theaters.

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Nine Days Reviews

A unique concept captured by Edson Oda, the film is led by a fantastic performance from Winston Duke and beautifully captures the idea of life.

Full Review | Mar 1, 2024

Seen through the eyes of five souls competing to be born, Nine Days is a poignant analysis of existence that reminds us of what makes life worth living.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 22, 2023

The outlook on life from the different character’s perspectives sets up great dynamics and conversations to sort through and try to find yourself in when you’re agreeing or disagreeing.

Full Review | Jul 19, 2023

There's not one wasted detail in [Edson] Oda's movie.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | May 31, 2023

A small miracle of a film, Nine Days pokes and prods at the darkest corners of the existential without ever surrendering to the heavy fetters of nihilism.

Full Review | Apr 25, 2023

For a first-time filmmaker to create so much profound beauty with such a humble story is an outstanding triumph of cinema.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 23, 2022

Edison Oda’s long-awaited debut feature is a pensive meditation on the act of playing God and the randomness of choosing what (in this case, a soul) that makes a life worth living.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Aug 16, 2022

Nine Days is a startlingly confident debut for Oda. The concepts are cleverly executed, the emotional content is first-rate, and the performances are highlights in the careers of nearly every actor involved.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | May 17, 2022

From the first frame of the film, the world and how it works sucks the audience in and the film best of all has the confidence to give answers to what it can and admit when it doesn't know an answer.

Full Review | Feb 22, 2022

In addition to a stunning performance from Zazie Beetz, Nine Days also features Benedict Wong, Tony Hale, and Bill Skarsgård.

Full Review | Jan 6, 2022

Does not presume to give us all the answers to time and space, but it does posit, without judgement and without pretension, what it means to live meaningfully.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 24, 2021

It's strange, stylised and a little slow, but surprisingly profound on what it takes to live a life properly.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 20, 2021

Nine Days is, in its subdued way, a profound and powerful commentary on life.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 20, 2021

Although arguably a smidge too ponderous and self-serious for its own good, Nine Days still represents a reasonably promising debut for its writer-director Edson Oda.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 15, 2021

Everything feels very human and surprisingly artistic in this simplistic depiction of 'life' before life.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 28, 2021

Here you get a double helping of philosophical. Enough to make even the most reluctant think about life as you think you know it.

Nine Days is at once restrained and brimming with emotion thanks to its story and phenomenal cast.

Full Review | Nov 27, 2021

Imaginative, heartfelt and very metaphysical, Nine Days is a thought-provoking look at what it means to be human.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Oct 23, 2021

A group of unborn souls compete for a place on Earth in a poignant reminder of the fleeting beauty of life.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 22, 2021

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‘Nine Days’: Life After Death (and Before Life)

By David Fear

We are born, we live, and we die. Before we can get on that particular merry-go-round, however, we must first be interviewed. The interrogator is tall, quiet, fastidious, well-dressed. Small granny spectacles perch on his nose as he asks questions of those who sit before him. And when he’s not doing that, he’s reviewing former “vacancies” that he’s filled, watching on a bank of monitors displaying numerous lives in progress. If we are lucky, we are chosen to go forth, from cradle to grave. If not, perhaps the man will do what he can to give us one fleeting moment of happiness before we disappear into the ether.

This is the premise of Nine Days, Edson Oda’s odd, affecting portrait of a prelife purgatory A cross between a Gondry-esque chin-stroker and a Zen Buddhist tweak on The Good Place, Nine Days — so named for the length it takes to choose a candidate for birth — has its share of near-twee tics. Will, the stoic gent who’s one of this limbo’s selectors, dresses like an uptight Amish metaphysics professor. (He’s played by Us / Black Panther star Winston Duke , who proves he’s as adept at art-house minimalism as he is at horror/Marvel movie maximalism.) His headquarters is a throwback Craftsman house in the middle of a literal nowhere, and he watches his former picks go about their lives via vintage home-entertainment equipment and videotapes. Before a life begins, it’s represented by color bars and a test-pattern whistle. Last-wish requests turn into arts-and-crafts projects involving fake beach scenes, movie screens, stationary cycles, jaunty music, teary cheeks.

Yet what might seem, at first sneer, like just a hipster’s notion of eternity as an artisanal, analog-tech ghost town eventually reveals a deeper purpose, and a determination to move past any too-cool-for-film-school superficiality. A Japanese Brazilian filmmaker with a background in commercials, Oda is taking big philosophical swings with his debut: What are the nature of souls? Is a life something to be earned, rather than gifted? Does the beauty of being human outweigh the pain of existence, or do these two elements symbiotically feed off each other, yin to yang? Who are we, before we are anything at all?

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Having been shaken by seeing a former case study die in a car crash, Will has begun questioning the nature of his endeavor as he and his assistant (Benedict Wong) run through a new batch of candidates, some of whom are played by Tony Hale (funny), Bill Skarsgård (freaky), and Zazie Beetz (fabulous). The latter, in particular, keeps lobbing queries back at the interviewer, forcing him to engage in a way he’d usually rather not. Not to mention the fact that Will is one of the few in this vaguely pastoral purgatory to have actually been on Earth, an experience that still weighs on him.

It’s heavy, heady stuff, coming at you via a delivery system of catalog-worthy set design, magic-hour cinematography, and often tamped-down, deadpan performances. And somehow, it all works in harmony to create a ripple effect of feeling that reverberates strongly under its placid surfaces. (The closest thing this resembles isn’t something like, say, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind so much as Columbus, that quiet, contemplative indie sleeper starring John Cho from 2017 that also trafficked in form-and-content exteriors and interior musings.) Oda was quoted as saying that during production, Wong dubbed the film “spi-fi,” short for “spiritual fiction” — an apt catch-all term that applies to a growing subgenre that speculates on life after death, life before life, literal long, dark/light nights of the soul, et al. So many of these stories tend to leave little more than a whimsical, chalky quirk-cinema aftertaste. Nine Days doesn’t just tempt fate on that count; it also asks that its lead actor send the movie off with an almost childlike dramatic interpretation of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” The degree of difficulty is high. The payoff, somehow, is extraordinary.

This review originally ran as part of our 2020 Sundance Film Festival coverage.

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Nine Days review – flavoursome metaphysical fable of souls queueing up to be born

Bringing earnest literary grandstanding to more or less the same plot as Pixar’s Soul, this is an awkward but still striking debut picture

A lthough arguably a smidge too ponderous and self-serious for its own good, Nine Days still represents a reasonably promising debut for its writer-director Edson Oda. This Brazilian-Japanese film-maker, who comes out of the world of advertising and developed this through the Sundance Lab (not always a great sign to be honest) has crafted a visually striking work that blends metaphysics, moral philosophy and melodrama into a potent movie cocktail. The result is flavoursome and distinctive, but probably didn’t need the paper umbrella of grad-school literary grandstanding, a maraschino cherry garnish of sentimentality, and dash-of-absinthe cray-cray.

It was probably sheer accident in terms of core plot device set-up, but Nine Days (which premiered at the Sundance film festival in January 2020), is very similar to Pixar animated feature Soul , which came out at the end of the same year. Like Soul, Nine Days concerns itself with unborn entities, all of whom are hoping to find passage into the world of the living. They will never remember their time in this strange-looking clapboard house filled with TV sets and shabby filing cabinets, a manse eerily sited in the middle of a desert expanse (actually, the Great Salt Lake).

Each soul is processed by celestial bureaucrat Will (Winston Duke) who, unlike his colleague Kyo (the ever welcome Benedict Wong), once actually lived on Earth before landing his current gig. It’s Will’s job to decide which of the entities – played by Bill Skarsgard, Tony Hale, David Rysdahl, Arianna Ortiz and Zazie Beetz – will get to replace one of Will’s favourite earlier placements, a violinist named Amanda who inexplicably killed herself. Assessment consists of interviews where Will asks each candidate to answer a moral conundrum, as well as studying how they react to streaming footage of people living life on Earth.

If they don’t get chosen, they get to choose an earthly moment of any kind to live in that Will and Kyo recreate for them using projectors and props. That concept is similar to one in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 1998 film After Life , where the special-moment recreations were blessings bestowed by heavenly artisans on the newly deceased, rather than the never-born. It all made a lot more sense in Kore-eda’s film, which had an elegant simplicity, warmth and wit that’s mostly absent from Nine Days. That said, After Life didn’t have Duke reciting Walt Whitman like he was auditioning for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, a closing scene both tender, ridiculous and strangely affecting.

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Summary Will (Winston Duke) spends his days in a remote outpost watching the live Point of View (POV) on TV's of people going about their lives, until one subject perishes, leaving a vacancy for a new life on earth. Soon, several candidates — unborn souls — arrive at Will's to undergo tests determining their fitness, facing oblivion when they ar ... Read More

Directed By : Edson Oda

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Nine Days review: Existential drama about unborn souls competing for life lacks spark

A tall man and a shorter woman stand in a desert as the sun sets, they face each other with a gap between them

If the soul exists, does it enter the world fully formed, cranked out by some celestial factory with a quota to meet? It's a question that's long proved irresistible for Hollywood, in everything from Shirley Temple's Technicolor tour of a cherubic pre-existence to last year's jazz-inflected Soul, an inventive Pixar comedy that depicted life's preamble as a surreal landscape of New Age blips and blunders.

Nine Days, the feature filmmaking debut for São Paulo-born, LA-based director Edson Oda, is the latest to ponder this metaphysical terrain: it's the story of a pre-mortal bureaucrat, Will (Winston Duke, Us), whose job is to interview potential candidates for life – unborn souls awaiting the chance to shuffle onto this mortal coil.

"You are being considered for the amazing opportunity of life," he tells a prospective applicant, with all the enthusiasm of a salesman pushing washer-dryers at a discount department store.

Outfitted in a button-up shirt, wire-rimmed glasses and suspenders, Will is a man out of both time and space, more mid-century bookkeeper than cosmic arbiter of souls.

A tall Black man wearing trousers and a vest holds his hands up to his glasses as he stands in a grey desert

Inside his modest weatherboard house on the interdimensional plain, he's glued to a bank of old television sets like David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth, watching, and recording – on VHS tapes, no less – the lives of those he's ushered into existence. (Turns out pre-life is pretty low-tech, or an art director's nostalgic vision of the recent past.)

Through a series of Blade Runner-like interviews designed to assess the candidates' humanity, Will whittles his current crop down to five pending souls, who then have nine days to prove they've got what it takes to survive life.

It's effectively an existential reality TV knockout round that will leave one lucky – or should that be unlucky? – contestant with a lifetime on Earth.

There's the shy one (David Rysdahl), the curious one (Arianna Ortiz), the 'funny' one (Arrested Development's Tony Hale) and the headstrong problem solver (Bill Skarsgård, eerily fresh-faced sans Pennywise makeup), with a free-thinking wildcard – Zazie Beetz's Emma – serving as the dramatic catalyst for our dour, emotionally repressed hero.

A young white man wearing a grey tshirt looks worried, a blurry lamp in the background

In a distinct echo of Kore-eda's After Life (1998) – let's politely call it an homage – unsuccessful applicants leave with a consolation prize: a single memory they can experience for a moment, presumably before being vanished into spiritual oblivion.

It's one of those ambitious concepts that's freighted with possibility, and Oda, who also wrote the screenplay, does a decent job of maintaining the intrigue for a stretch – there's an appealing dissonance between the sci-fi set-up and the film's homespun, almost dreary aesthetic, and in the dialogue that distills metaphysical head-scratchers to mundane conversations.

A 50 year old white man with a stubbly beard looks up plaintively, blurry lights in the background

Oda is a successful commercial director whose work combines pop culture nostalgia and DIY technique, one of a slew of ad-world filmmakers whose work feels inspired by Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry – those erstwhile music video tricksters who clowned on high-concept premises with irreverent, inventive formalism in films like Being John Malkovich and The Science of Sleep.

Jonze is an executive producer on Nine Days, and his spirit hovers at its fringes, but Oda's more earnest approach, while sometimes visually creative, is far removed from the funny, impish execution of the Adaptation director.

Once Nine Days reveals its narrative hand, it quickly goes to pieces – collapsing into largely predictable drama at the expense of its concept.

A young Black woman sitting on a 70s sofa in a loungeroom, sunlight pouring into the room

We discover that Will, who was alive before his current post, is haunted by a deep sense of regret for the life he lived, a feeling compounded as he watches one of his previous, successful candidates – now a classical concert violinist – run aground in the existential abyss.

While there's something fascinating about Will's lonely voyeurism, the doomed limbo of an eternity spent watching other peoples' lives on screen, Oda's screenplay instead goads the film toward rote dramatic revelations about living your best life, all spliced with the kind of images – the simple pleasure of a bike ride, waves lapping a beach shoreline – that come off as cheesy where they're supposed to be poignant.

I kept waiting for American Beauty's plastic bag to drift into frame, captured on the kind of 'vintage' camcorder the film might fetishise.

Even in the unreal logic of the world that the film establishes, unanswered questions hang. Why do all these pre-souls behave in distinctly Earthly ways? How is Will's neighbour, Kyo (Benedict Wong), a voice of everyday humanity, when he's never been alive? And when did the capacity for moral reasoning become grounds to put someone in the world?

A 50 year old Chinese man in a suit jacket and green slacks with a bag slung across his shoulder stands in a desert

It's all a bit reductive, sidelining the wonderful chaos of the universe for a schematic, depressingly human perspective.

"What's it like, to be alive?" asks Emma in one scene, a question that might have been affecting if the line didn't land with the thud of a local drama workshop, grasping at unearned profundity.

Beetz, who is very good as usual, makes the most of a role that isn't much more than a screenwriting lab shortcut, while Duke, an imposing actor who fills the frame with melancholy, gives a performance of quietly calibrated restraint, preserving his character's enigma long after the film has all but abandoned him.

No performer could rescue the heavily telegraphed, gear-crunching climax that lies in wait for these characters, however; an overripe lunge for catharsis that's so "Oscar clip" silly it was all I could do to keep from cackling.

Your mileage, as they used to say, may vary. Warmer hearts might prove more receptive.

Nine Days is in cinemas nationally from July 15; the Sydney release date is TBC due to lockdown.

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Movie Review – Nine Days (2021)

March 8, 2022 by Robert Kojder

Nine Days , 2021.

Written and Directed by Edson Oda. Starring Winston Duke, Zazie Beetz, Bill Skarsgård, Benedict Wong, Tony Hale, David Rysdahl, Geraldine Hughes, Arianna Ortiz, Perry Smith, Lisa Starrett, and John Forker.

A reclusive man conducts a series of interviews with human souls for a chance to be born.

Will (Winston Duke delivering one of the most deeply moving performances of the year so far) watches over the land of the living in Nine Days , jotting down notes on whatever happens to those individuals. It might sound like he is an omnipotent deity, but it’s actually said best by another character that he is more of a cog in a machine. That machine is precisely a remarkably unique system that sees Will as one of many judges of life, conducting a nine-day interview session following the tragic death of one of his favorite humans to live vicariously through.

That would be violinist virtuoso Amanda (Lisa Starrett), who, with no signs of depression or suicidal tendencies, decides to speed up, crash her car, and kill herself. Naturally, this jolts Will, who believes that there has to be another explanation besides what’s evident to us the first time we see it, let alone the number of times Will rewinds the VHS tape to analyze the event. Nevertheless, there is also a vacancy among the humans he observes, springing forth the aforementioned interview process, which turns out to feature souls vying for an opportunity at human life.

Written and directed by Japanese Brazilian filmmaker Edson Oda (also his feature-length narrative debut, a mesmerizing singular transfixing vision that should justifiably garner all sorts of awards attention and open more doors to realizing future projects) is straightforward with the premise, there are a few character reveals that won’t be spoiled. However, for the most part, Nine Days is not a supernatural mystery, so those seeking something heady need not apply. If you are on board with the idea of the likes of Zazie Beetz, Tony Hale, Bill Skarsgard, and others playing somewhat emotionless versions of themselves learning about life and deciding who they want to be and what kind of lifestyle they want to live, to determine what soul goes on to inhabit a human body, that’s enough to come out blown away by what’s here.

Aesthetically, the film is also striking, placing Will in a secluded house in the middle of a desert. The isolation is captured with vast landscape shots, with Will’s only social interaction coming from Benedict Wong’s co-worker Kyo (who is there to observe Will doing his job), who occasionally watches footage of human minds and assists with the selective process forth new life. Small creative choices such as going with a combination of technological devices at the outpost ranging from VHS tapes to projectors give the film a sense of methodical craftsmanship down to every little detail. The same goes for the costume design, which has Will in a more old-fashioned wardrobe.

Nine Days uses this elaborate production design for a series of interviews that start intense (and almost hostile) with Will posing extreme circumstance scenarios such as the ability to take the life of a loved one to save other lives. It shouldn’t surprise that all interviewees generally have different reactions and responses; some are more optimistic, some don’t see the point of such terrorizing questions because they want to live a relaxing life, and some suggest something more violent. In the case of Emma (Zazie Beetz), she refuses to play along with the hypotheticals while demanding more context. Simultaneously, they are told to check out the lives of others to get a further idea of what the meaning of life would be to them. Every day, a member of the group is rejected, but not before having a memory they did enjoy from observing life to be re-created as realistic as possible (making use of holographic screens) before vanishing into nothingness. As you can imagine, some of these sequences are among the most tear-jerking (lots of tears flow in this one), also in part due to the incredible ensemble in top form.

It’s all imaginatively clever to peel away everything from what’s essential to a person, the different ways people can see the world, and how that all connects to someone choosing life. Keep in mind, Will is going through an emotional crisis not only from his pride and joy committing suicide but his entire process facing head-on confrontation from his beliefs and Emma. With that said, every major player gets at least one memorable scene, whether it be Tony Hale getting heated and making a fair point about Will’s mental state and qualifications or Bill Skarsgard recounting a disturbing event he saw browsing other lives. There’s also delicate addressing of the suicide itself and how even with keeping tabs on an individual to this extent, it’s still possible to miss signs of depression or suicidal thoughts.

Where Nine Days goes from this is beautifully life-affirming and wouldn’t work without Winston Duke taking on all of Will’s complexities. It’s a showstopping performance filled with everything from sorrow to regret to nuclear energy to celebratory joy. All of it is heightened by a powerfully sweeping score from Antonio Pinto that is in step with the themes and story every bit of the way. Nine Days more than an outstanding debut; it’s a miraculous and flooring work of art tackling the intricacies of life itself and purpose.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews, follow my Twitter or Letterboxd , or email me at [email protected]

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Directors: Edson Oda Writers: Edson Oda Stars: Winston Duke, Zazie Beetz, Benedict Wong, Tony Hale, Bill Skarsgård

Synopsis: A man interviews five unborn souls to determine which one can be given life on Earth.

Nine Days look through its own highly contemplative lens of love, fear, hate, anger, pride, disgust, and joy to view each other’s autonomy. Edison Oda’s long-awaited debut feature is a pensive meditation on the act of playing God and the randomness of choosing what (in this case, a soul) that makes a life worth living.

The concept of pre-existence is the focus of Oda’s film, even if some confuse the setup with reincarnation. That’s what Will (Us’s Winton Duke, just remarkable here) attempts to navigate arduously. He is The Interviewer- being that auditions unborn souls for a chance to be born into the world. It’s a stressful position to be in. Knowing your work is purely judged upon a soul’s choices that lead to success and failures. As the souls begin to emanate across the desert landscape, all end up on Will’s country home’s doorstep.

To witness this is Kyo (Benedict Wong). A loyal soul that arrived ages ago but never left. He has never been human and is obsessed with watching Will’s top choices for life on earth. All are displayed on stacked old television sets so he can observe their decisions and their effects. That’s when Will’s favorite, a young violinist named Amanda, dies after driving her car into the wall of a cement underpass. That’s when they all start showing up at his door because a slot has just opened up. All while grappling with why Amanda was so careless with the precious gift she was given.

Nine Days is a phenomenal piece of filmmaking. Oda also wrote the script that needed a steady, patient hand that could have crumbled apart because of its fragile nature. The script is steeped in themes of creationism in its most basic form. Earth was created from free will (that’s foreshadowing), and God has the right to tinker with that process.

As Will begins, with what seems to be an arbitrary interview process, he gives them strict guidelines. He analysis each soul’s essence. Emma (Zazie Beetz) is empathetic and guarded, while Alexander (Tony Hale) is the yes-man and won’t take anything seriously. Kane (Bill Skarsgård) is a stoic realist who carefully considers his options before deciding. It’s all about the mental makeup that navigates life’s pitfalls, while Will forgets what qualities make life worth living. What he is doing is now questioning his belief in free will and the responsibility that comes with that.

Winston Duke is a powerhouse as Will in Nine Days. At points, he quietly contemplates each move, note, glance, and huff of air with tenderness and understanding. At others, his anger is as much as a light switch as he struggles with the decision that has no easy answers or guarantees. It’s a phenomenal performance that shows he has no ceiling. Along with Wong’s scene-stealing supporting turn, Beetz’s soulful presence, and Hale’s limited but moving portrayal, it may be the best casting of any film this year. Along with Antonio Pinto’s evocative musical score and beautiful cinematography by Wyatt Garfield, everything works so harmoniously.

Nine Days isn’t a film that works on many levels, but the one it plays on has higher aspirations are powerful and profound. Even if the ending scene is a bit too much epic poetry for my tastes for a film that is already so visually lyrical, however, Ado does make an apt point. One’s aspirations for experiencing moments of pure joy are universal. Will can’t help if he’s that picky. By all means, it’s hard to find that one leaf among all those blades of grass.

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A reclusive man conducts a series of interviews with human souls for a chance to be born. A reclusive man conducts a series of interviews with human souls for a chance to be born. A reclusive man conducts a series of interviews with human souls for a chance to be born.

Winston Duke
Zazie Beetz
Bill Skarsgård
153 User reviews
100 Critic reviews
72 Metascore
5 wins & 22 nominations

Amanda's Mom
Amanda's Dad
Amanda (8 Years Old)
(as Eliza De Acevedo Brown)

Rick (14 Years Old)

(as Lisa Starrett)

(as Erika Vasquez)
(as Alvaro Cortez)

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Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Trivia Director Edson Oda sites that the films that influenced this project include After Life (1998) by Hirokazu Koreeda and The Tree of Life (2011) by Terrence Malick.
Goofs Will prefaces his "sadistic guard/pull the chair" scenario by saying that there is no right or wrong answer, just say what comes to mind. However, he disputes Kane's answer to the question.

Will : Have you ever reckoned the Earth much? Spend this day and night with me And you shall possess the origin of all poems I, I celebrate myself and sing myself And what I assume you shall assume For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you I loafe and invite my soul I lean and I loafe at my ease Observing a spear of summer grass Ah, my tongue, owww Every atom of my blood born here From parents born here And their parents the same As their parents the same I, now 37 years old and in perfect health, Begin hoping to cease not till death The smoke of my breath echoes, ripples Buzzed whispers, love root, silk thread, crotch and vine My inspiration and respiration The passing of air and blood through my lungs The sound of the belched words of my voice Loos'd to the eddies of the wind A few light kisses, a few embraces The reaching around of arms, the play of the light And shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag The delight alone or the rush of the streets Or along the fields and hillsides The feeling of health The full noon trill The song of me Rising from bed and greeting the sun. Hey, sun - sun, sun, sun, sun, sun, sun, sun, sun, sun The last scud of sun holds back for me It flings my likeness after the rest And as true as any on the shadowed wilds It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk I depart as air I effuse my flesh in eddies and drift it in lacy jags And to die is different than anyone supposed And luckier I bequeath myself to the dirt To grow from the grass I love If you want me again Look for me under your boot soles You will hardly know who I am or what I mean But I shall be good health to you nevertheless Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged Missing me one place, search another I stop someplace Waiting for you.

Connections Referenced in Amanda the Jedi Show: Movies that Destroyed and Restored my Faith in Humanity | Sundance 2022 (2022)

User reviews 153

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Nov 28, 2021
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July 30, 2021 (United States)
United States
Official site
Sao Paulo, Brazil (on location)
Baked Studios
Juniper Productions
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Aug 1, 2021

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Runtime 2 hours 4 minutes

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‘nine days’: film review | sundance 2020.

Winston Duke stars in 'Nine Days,' Edson Oda's feature debut about a man tasked with interviewing souls for the chance to be sent out into life.

By Todd McCarthy

Todd McCarthy

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It’s a rare occasion when a first-time filmmaker embraces the metaphysical, and rarer still when said director does so without embarrassing pretentiousness, but Edson Oda thinks big and mostly pulls it off in Nine Days. Uneven but stunningly crafted and concerned with nothing less than who deserves a space on planet Earth, this is a carefully thought-out original creation that some will argue belongs in an art installation sooner than in a commercial cinema. Whichever the case, this is a special, one-of-a-kind work that announces a significant talent.

A Brazilian-born USC graduate who has directed numerous corporate projects and music videos, Oda shows from the first scene that he has a great eye for fashioning images. What he does with his talent places him in a rarified zone where art-making and philosophical speculation merge, and where adventurous young viewers will make a point of finding it.

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Screen Rant

Nine days review: a jarring, soulful meditation on the intensity of existence.

Thoughtful and hauntingly beautiful in style and treatment, Nine Days emerges as a sublime slice of cinema that sincerely tugs at the heartstrings.

Cinema helps audiences unravel the many layers of life and understand what existence essentially means, providing a glimpse into things often overlooked. Certain films, such as Kore-eda Hirokazu’s After Life and Pixar’s Soul , help transport the audience into realms beyond their comprehension, particularly those that delicately hinge between life and death. Edson Oda’s feature-length directorial debut, Nine Days , follows a similar premise, wherein souls after death compete for a fresh chance at life, whilst parsing the meaning of being alive. Thoughtful and hauntingly beautiful in style and treatment, Nine Days emerges as a sublime slice of cinema that sincerely tugs at the heartstrings.

Carrying out a quaint, solitary life at a beautiful home in the desert, Will (Winston Duke) watches over the lives of those he has selected over the years, noting every detail of their everyday existence. Being an interviewer and selector of lives best suited for rebirth, Will carries out his duty with utmost dedication, looking into the multifarious vignettes of the lives he chooses. However, after the sudden death of Will’s favorite soul Amanda (Lisa Starrett), he must conduct a nine-day interview process to select the best candidate in Amanda’s stead. The cheerful and warm Kyo (Benedict Wong) assists Will in the selection process, although it is hinted that the former had never experienced life before, imbuing the character with a sort of otherworldly wonder.

RELATED: Luca vs Soul: Which Pixar Movie Is Better?

While a touch of the supernatural looms over the entirety of Nine Days , this is not a film that is keen on peeling back the layers surrounding the mysteries of life after death or the elusive machinations of a limbo world. Instead, what Oda chooses to focus on is surprisingly human: what makes a soul eligible for a new life, and what indeed are the parameters of a life brimming with happiness and promise? Amanda’s death haunts Will’s every movement, as the 28-year-old violin virtuoso had never exhibited signs of depression or suicidal tendencies, but had ultimately made the decision to die by suicide via a deliberate car crash. This understandably shatters Will as this reopens his repressed wounds, his misgivings regarding his judgment, with the enormity of his decisions weighing heavily upon his psyche.

Should he choose the tender-hearted and artistic Mike (David Rysdahl), the empathetic-but-firm Maria (Arianna Ortiz), the laidback and easy-going Alexander (Tony Hale), or the nihilistic, yet emotionally balanced Kane (Bill Skarsgård)? Although Will manages to conduct the interview process with controlled aloofness throughout, the arrival of Emma (Zazie Beetz) cataclysms the cracks within Will’s soul, exposing a deeply emotional, vulnerable man within despite believing that she “does not fit” due to her unique perspectives on human existence and her purely optimistic, emotionally driven responses. Apart from being an odyssey on human vulnerability, Nine Days celebrates the little moments that are most often taken for granted.

The tactility of everyday experiences, such as the sensation of eating a peach, the sudden downpour of rain on a sunny day, the immense beauty of the act of walking on a sandy beach, sharing a tender moment with a loved one, and so on prove to be more meaningful than they are often believed to be. Nine Days celebrates the intense sensuality of existence, while not disregarding the abject cruelty that often accompanies it, as exemplified by Amanda’s heartbreaking fate and the relentless bullying experienced by a 14-year-old child. Winston Duke delivers the performance of a lifetime as the guarded, infinitely layered Will, displaying a range so visceral that audiences are bound to be swept away by the authenticity of his portrayal.

The other characters, especially Beetz, Skarsgård, and Hale, highlight different aspects of humanity through their measured, grounded performances, elevating the film to the ambit of a fantasy drama that overflows with heart and pathos. In terms of aesthetics, Nine Days is breathtaking to behold, be it in the form of the grained, textured shots of a cozy microcosm in the middle of nowhere, the dozen bulky televisions and VHS tapes seen throughout, or the costumes worn by Will and Kyo in this strange, otherworldly world. Nine Days might just be the most earnest and heartwarming piece of cinema released this year so far, as it is a cinematic experience that is genuinely beautiful and cathartic in nature.

NEXT: Nine Days Trailer: Winston Duke Offers Souls A Chance To Be Born

Nine Days initially premiered at Sundance Film Festival in January 2020. It was released in U.S. theatres on July 30, 2021, courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics. The film is 124 minutes long and is rated R for mild violence and language.

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Nine days - movie review.

With its mere concept, Edson Oda ’s feature film debut, Nine Days , certainly had the potential of falling victim to an avalanche of clichés that would only be further piled on with winces and eye rolls from the audience. However, the way Oda confidently composes and presents the film to us, he is careful not to portray the existential subject as corny or even pretentious. Rather, through a variety of characters, he highlights the ways in which ordinary people approach and appreciate the world around them and even themselves.

In a remote house in the desert, Will ( Winston Duk e) spends his days monitoring a wall of televisions that display the lives of individuals through each of their own unique points of view from the comfort of his couch. But when his favorite person, a young violinist named Amanda, unexpectedly dies, there is now a vacancy, and Will must judge the next soul to fill the spot. Soon, a select number of unborn souls that carry their unique perspectives and personalities - Bill Skarsgård, Tony Hale, Arianna Ortiz, David Rysdahl , and Zazie Beetz – arrive at Will’s doorstep, and over the next nine days (if they make it that long) are subjected to his numerous tests in determining whether or not they may live. But through this process, Will is pushed to confront himself and his past when the free-spirited, slightly-dissident candidate, Emma ( Beetz ), forces him to do so.

The rupture of Will’s simplistic life and job comes from Emma, who seems to embody the heart of the film, when she shows Will that life is not always black-and-white. Simple answers cannot and should not always be given. She is not afraid of being open with her emotions and curiosities by questioning Will at almost every turn. But these attributes are things that not only frustrate Will, but he also fears for her if she enters the harsh, unforgiving world that he painfully experienced and is reminded of everyday. Despite this, Emma’s instincts point to her belief that simple things in life can be memorable, instead of just fleeting. And things that do indeed makes us feel alive should, over everything else, be cherished forever.

Sure, the message of the film borders on cheesy, but who cares? It’s all about the delivery. Overall, it is a sweet and thoughtful film sprinkled with moments of wonderfully simple joys that will make the audience reflect upon their own lives as Will did with his own (though probably not in the same dramatic way). And, like I said, it could have been pretentious, but it is not. Trust me. Sometimes a film comes along that reminds us that we should appreciate living life a little bit more, and Nine Days does just that.

Nine Days is now playing in select theaters.

MPAA Rating: R for language. Runtime: 124 mins Director : Edson Oda Writer: Edson Oda Cast: Winston Duke; Zazie Beetz; Benedict Wong Genre : Drama | Fantasy Tagline: Life Begins at the End. Memorable Movie Quote: Distributor: Sony Classics Official Site: https://www.sonyclassics.com/film/ninedays Release Date: August 6, 2021 DVD/Blu-ray Release Date: Synopsis : Will ( Winston Duke ) spends his days in a remote outpost watching the live Point of View (POV) on TV’s of people going about their lives, until one subject perishes, leaving a vacancy for a new life on earth. Soon, several candidates — unborn souls — arrive at Will's to under go tests determining their fitness, facing oblivion when they are deemed unsuitable. But Will soon faces his own existential challenge in the form of free-spirited Emma ( Zazie Beetz ), a candidate who is not like the others, forcing him to turn within and reckon with his own tumultuous past. Fueled by unexpected power, he discovers a bold new path forward in his own life.

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Touching meaning-of-life fantasy drama has strong language.

Nine Days Movie Poster: In four equal slots with different color tints, the four stars appear: (left to right) Bill Skarsgård, Winston Duke, Zazie Beetz, and Benedict Wong

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Although the movie doesn't really come right out a

Only Will might qualify as a role model, and only

Main character Will (Winston Duke) is a Black man.

Person killed in car crash. Suicide note. Brief im

Kiss at wedding. Dialogue: "call some chicks."

Uses of "f--k," "s--t," "s--thole," "pain in the a

Drinks with dinner. Characters share beers. Dialog

Positive Messages

Although the movie doesn't really come right out and say it, the overall message is mainly about appreciating the gift that is life, including every little moment and every thing of beauty. Also, it's important to work on overcoming needless feelings of guilt.

Positive Role Models

Only Will might qualify as a role model, and only because he's so kind that he actually takes time out to create memories for his "unchosen" souls, which involves building sets and props. (One soul gets a "day on the beach," and another enjoys a bike ride through the "countryside.") Apparently, making these memories isn't part of the rules of this world; Will does them out of the goodness of his heart.

Diverse Representations

Main character Will (Winston Duke) is a Black man. Other key cast members include Zazie Beetz (who has German and South African roots), Benedict Wong (born in England to Hong Kong immigrant parents), and Arianna Ortiz (whose ethnicity is a mix of Indigenous Peruvian, Spanish, Black, and White). Other characters of color are seen in smaller or background roles.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Person killed in car crash. Suicide note. Brief images of shooting, with bloody wounds. Images of guns and target shooting. A child who's bullied fights back with a rock. Dialogue about a man raping and murdering girls. Upsetting dialogue involving a child in a threatening situation. Gross dialogue about man puking/swallowing and about feces blocking up a toilet.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Uses of "f--k," "s--t," "s--thole," "pain in the ass," "damn," "pissed," "d--k."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Drinks with dinner. Characters share beers. Dialogue about "grabbing a beer." Mention of "drunk driving."

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Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Nine Days is a beautiful, mysterious fantasy/drama about a metaphysical way station where a man named Will (Winston Duke, of Black Panther ) chooses a soul to be given life. Language is the biggest issue, with uses of "f--k," "s--t," "ass," "damn," "pissed," and "d--k." There are also some violent images, including guns and shooting, brief bloody wounds, a child being bullied (and then retaliating by hitting back with a rock), a person being killed in a car crash, a suicide note, and various examples of upsetting, violent, or disgusting dialogue ("rape," "murder," "vomit," "poop," etc.). There's also some sex-related dialogue and a kiss at a wedding. Characters share beers, and there are casual drinks with dinner, in addition to dialogue about a drunk driver. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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What's the Story?

In NINE DAYS, in a house seemingly in the middle of nowhere, Will (Winston Duke) watches a bank of TV sets, monitoring the progress of a woman named Amanda, as well as her tragedy. Soon Will has several visitors -- Mike (David Rysdahl), Alexander ( Tony Hale ), Kane ( Bill Skarsgård ), Maria (Arianna Ortiz), Anne (Perry Smith), and later Emma ( Zazie Beetz ) -- among them. Viewers learn that they're unborn souls, and that Will has been given the task of choosing which among them will get the chance to be born. Another unborn soul, Kyo ( Benedict Wong ), hangs around and helps Will out. As candidates are eliminated, Will does his best to create "memories" for them that they can hang onto. But as Will gets down to the final two candidates, it becomes clear that his obsession with Amanda is clouding his judgment. Can he make the correct choice?

Is It Any Good?

This beautiful, minimalist existential fantasy gets its power not only from its great cast, but also its refusal to answer questions or explain things. It's content to revel in mystery of being human. The feature debut of writer/director Edson Oda, Nine Days begins with its simple, powerful setting: a modest house that seems to be in the middle of nowhere. Characters occasionally walk away from the house, and the land looks like it stretches on forever. It feels like an isolated way station, maybe in the center of the universe. Will (what better name for someone in charge of choosing life?) never lets on why he asks the questions he asks and is forever reiterating that there are no "wrong" answers.

But rather than being frustrating, this is constantly intriguing. The other characters, like us, are forever trying to figure out the situation, and what exactly to say or do -- but there's no right answer. They're all likable, and they all seem like good candidates, so Will's choices, again, seem arbitrary. The only thing that's sure in Nine Days is that Will feels guilt over the fate of his pick Amanda, and that guilt pushes up against everything else in the movie. When he makes his eventual realization -- followed by an exuberant recitation of Walt Whitman -- it has a visceral impact. A weight has lifted, and life feels full of possibility. This is a beautiful movie that's shrouded in mystery but also in hope and appreciation for all we're given.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Nine Days ' violent content . How did it make you feel? Was it exciting? Shocking? What did the movie show or not show to achieve this effect? Why is that important?

What's the major takeaway from this movie? How do you suppose you can appreciate your life in a more effective way?

Why does Will blame himself for Amanda's death? Have you ever blamed yourself for something that wasn't your fault?

Did you notice positive diverse representations in the movie? What about stereotypes?

Movie Details

In theaters : July 30, 2021
On DVD or streaming : November 2, 2021
Cast : Winston Duke , Zazie Beetz , Bill Skarsgård , Benedict Wong
Director : Edson Oda
Inclusion Information : Asian directors, Latino directors, Black actors, Female actors, Asian actors
Studio : Sony Pictures Classics
Genre : Drama
Run time : 124 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : language
Last updated : March 23, 2024

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Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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DVD & Streaming
Drama , Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Content Caution

A man showing a woman something on a beach

In Theaters

July 30, 2021
Winston Duke as Will; Zazie Beetz as Emma; Bill Skarsgård as Kane; Benedict Wong as Kyo; Tony Hale as Alexander; David Rysdahl as Mike; Arianna Ortiz as Maria; Geraldine Hughes as Colleen; Erika Vasquez as Luiza; Perry Smith as Anne

Home Release Date

November 2, 2021

Distributor

Sony Pictures Classics

Movie Review

They come alone.

Questioning, confused, but with sudden purpose, they walk across the sand, to the lonely house and the lonely man inside.

Will opens the door for each in turn. He gives each a name, offers each a cup of tea. How old are you? He asks. Some don’t know. Some are aware that they’ve been alive for, oh, a few hours perhaps.

Alive , they say. And yet, they don’t live. Not really. That’s why they’re here, after all—to have a chance at life. To be born, to breathe, to strive, to fail, to love, to die.

Old televisions fill Will’s living room, stacked one on the other—flickering building blocks chronicling meals and marriages, business meetings and bar fights. When he selects someone to live, Will watches them on one of these screens. Or rather, he watches what they watch; their own eyes serving as cameras, their ears microphones. Will sees their lives unfold moment by moment, from beginning to end.

But one screen stands static, bars of unmoving color stamped across the glass. The life that had filled that screen is gone.

Will must fill that vacant screen with a new life, new promise. He hopes to avoid the mistakes he made with ( Amanda ) the life that came before, a life snuffed like a candle. Gone with a shock, gone too soon.

And so, Will asks questions of the applicants who come to his door. What would you do with the gift of life? How could you spend your seconds? Are you willing to risk? To kill? To die? To live?

There are no wrong answers, he reassures, but Will measures each answer in turn, judging the worthiness of these applicant souls. For nine days, he questions. For nine days, they answer—if they’re good. If they’re lucky.

One will receive life; real life. The others will end before they begin. But perhaps not all will have been in vain. Perhaps they need not end alone.

Positive Elements

“As you know, you are being considered for the amazing opportunity of life,” Will tells his applicants when they first meet. And as the film goes on, we see what an amazing opportunity it is.

Nine Days is, at least in part, reminding us that life is indeed a gift—one filled with myriad challenges and tragedies, but one filled with a million billion beauties, too. Will’s applicants spend much of their days watching Will’s TVs—getting a taste of what real life would entail.

Alas, only one will make the final cut. For the rest, it is the end. But Will does what he can to make the end bearable and, perhaps, memorable—even as his applicants enter the void.

When applicants fall out of the competition, Will asks them to write down a memory they watched—something they loved and would like to experience. He promises he’ll do his best to re-create that moment for them before they leave. And so he does—building gigantic screens and creating tiny moments (with his sometime coworker Kyo) that his applicants can carry with them into oblivion. Kyo, who works with many interviewers, says that Will’s unique in this: No one works as hard to make his applicants’ passing pleasant and meaningful. We see him make small, kindly gestures to those applicants during the process, too.

[ Spoiler Warning ] But Will is no omniscient judge: He, in his own way, feels very mortal and fallible, and his own weaknesses influence how he judges those in his care. Moreover, he was once alive—truly alive—and his time as a living soul seems filled with regret, so much so that he never wants to experience a taste of what he offers to his own applicants. If those applicants are trying to escape this semi-dead state of limbo, Will is himself in need of a bit of salvation. And, with a little help, he finds it.

Spiritual Elements

Nine Days is inherently spiritual—taking place entirely on what you could call a metaphysical plane. But it’s not a very Christian plane, nor does it reflect any other organized religion that I’m aware of. And if I had to hazard a guess as to what the creators wanted to convey, it’s that this life might be the only life we get: Better enjoy it.

But if we take the story of Nine Days at face value, it presupposes a few important concepts: There is a reality beyond what we can see and touch in this life, and that reality is run by rules and, presumably, a higher power. Will describes himself as a “cog in the wheel”—one of a number of people tasked (by someone or something) to both select people for life and to watch those lives after they’re selected.

The souls we meet here—those competing to live—aren’t immortal. They’re somehow born (perhaps a few hours before they meet Will) and then “die” if they’re not selected.

But that said, there is still the hope of an afterlife of sorts. Will himself once was alive and somehow found himself as this bureaucratic cog afterward.

And it’s important to note that no one we meet here—including Will and Kyo—seem to have the foggiest idea of how things actually work. Might there be a heaven or a hell or a cycle of reincarnation beyond what they see here? Maybe. Kyo even speculates that, just as they watch the living, maybe there are other beings that watch them —and more beings who watch those other beings and so on. “Deep,” he tells himself.

In the televised snippets of life that we see, someone gets married in a priest-officiated wedding.

Sexual Content

We see a few kisses on the television screens, which pretty much manifest as just a face getting really, really close to the “camera”. And as mentioned, someone gets married. One of the applicants has a crush on Will, and it’s suggested that she tries to tell him.

We hear about a makeout session gone really horribly wrong (detailed in “other negative elements”) and a twisted form of “love” (detailed in “violent content”). We glimpse a bra-like top on a swimming suit.

Amanda, the woman whose life was snuffed out way before it was time, focuses a lot of the “life” that we see through the television screens with other women—some of them involving ever-so-slightly lingering looks. Nothing else we see on her screen suggests a same-sex attraction, and she and her female companions could, very easily, be just good friends. But it could be the film itself was suggesting a certain romantic tug.

Violent Content

Will twists someone’s arm behind his back. “This is pain,” Will says, “and what you’re feeling now is nothing compared to what they feel when they’re alive.”

That’s the only violence we see from our core characters; everything else is given more distance as images on a screen. But Will’s not wrong. And some of the violence we see—and even violence we only hear about—can feel pretty jarring.

A man is shot by another, and we see the guy (from his own point of view) hold his bleeding stomach and his left leg (which may have started to go numb). Another of Will’s living subjects beats someone in the head with a rock. Another drives a car into a wall. Applicants see that one of Will’s living subjects is a frequent victim of bullying—bullying that sometimes comes with a physical component.

Applicants weigh what they see on screen and are asked what they’d do differently. When one applicant watches the man being shot by another, the applicant says he would’ve shot first. “The moment he moved he’d be dead,” he says. He doesn’t get why the bullied individual never stands up for himself. “I’d hit back,” he says. And when Will asks him if he then condones violence, the applicant says, “It’s not violence if you didn’t start it.” That same applicant is often appalled at the horrors he sees on Will’s TV. He relates one news story he saw there—of a middle school teacher who raped and killed two girls in his class because, he told police, he loved them.

Will is all-too-familiar with the hardness of the real world. He feels like his applicants have to be tough to deal with life, and many of his questions can be brutal. In the first, he tells applicants to imagine that they and their 11-year-old son are in a concentration camp: The guard orders the applicant to kill the son; if he doesn’t, the guard will kill the son, the applicant and everyone else in the camp. Kyo worries that Will emphasizes life’s hardships too much. “You always talk as if you’re sending them off to war,” Kyo tells him. And in a way, that’s what Will believes he’s doing.

There’s a joking reference to someone cutting of his privates with a plastic knife.

[ Spoiler Warning ] Amanda dies by running her car into a wall, and Will fears that she committed suicide. Those fears, and the theme of suicide itself, form a big part of this story.

Crude or Profane Language

We hear perhaps five or six f-words, as well as seven s-words. The word “a–” is used once, and we hear two misuses of God’s name.

Drug and Alcohol Content

One of Will’s applicants invites Will to “call some chicks” and share a beer with him. Will (who has no need of food or drink, nor has any desire to consume them, even though he could) declines at first. But later, he sits down with the applicant and hands him a beer, which the applicant happily drinks. Will also seems to drink—but he never removes the cap from the bottle.

We see some brief glimpses of people drinking—sometimes to apparent excess—on Will’s television screens. We hear a story that involved way too much alcohol (detailed a bit more below).

Other Negative Elements

During a shared dinner, Kyo and two applicants share “disgusting” stories with each other (even though none of the three have ever lived and have therefore learned about these stories second-hand). Kyo talks about two people who were trying to drive home after a long night of partying. One of the characters in Kyo’s story repeatedly vomits in his mouth and then swallows it again, not wanting to soil his friend’s car.

An applicant offers her own story involving a woman and a huge feces that wouldn’t go down the toilet. When her boyfriend wanted to use the toilet, in a panic she grabbed a toothbrush and whittled the offending feces down and away … but then the boyfriend used said toothbrush before he and the woman engaged in a makeout session.

Will keeps his “last wish” efforts secret, conducting them in a secret room. Kyo breaks a few rules for one of the applicants. We hear Kyo talk about how one of the people on Will’s TVs has been “on the toilet now for 25 minutes.”

For all its spiritual underpinnings, Nine Days is a humanistic fable—one trying to puzzle out meaning and fulfilment in a life freighted with pain, and in a life where the prospect of a loving, involved God feels uncertain. In fact, in the movie’s telling, the “afterlife” is a place muted—not dead, but deadened.

We Christians, of course, believe just the opposite: This world is but a mere shadow of the one that is to come —one where the colors are brighter and the songs are more beautiful and reality so vibrant that it can fill and break your heart at once. In that light, some viewers will find Nine Days perspective to be a bit off-putting. The movie’s R rating—almost entirely because of language—is worth a pause, as well.

But for me, Nine Days’ problems can be held in tension with its purpose.

This film asks us questions that it doesn’t necessarily know the answer to. What is beautiful? What gives our lives meaning? What do we treasure? What should we? It encourages us to not miss each day’s beauty, and to seek that beauty wherever and whenever we can. It reminds us of just how good an apricot can taste on a summer’s day, or how the breeze can stroke your hair like a mother, soothing you to sleep.

Will calls life an “amazing opportunity,” and so it is. And this opportunity, like a speculative stock, comes with no guarantees. It’s filled with promise but carries no promises. But the opportunity remains. And God wants us to enjoy the gift He gives us.

That’s what Nine Days tries to remind us of. We live a gift that we should never waste or throw away. Indeed, it’s more than a gift: It’s a responsibility.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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Nine Days Movie Explained: Ending, Themes & Free Will and The Human Condition Analysed

Nine Days Movie Ending Explained & Themes Analyzed: Japanese Brazilian writer-director Edson Oda’s ambitious debut feature Nine Days (2020) is a metaphysical humanist drama that deals with the pre-existence of the soul, the existentialist perception of the human condition, and the meaning of life. Oda’s leap into feature filmmaking, after a series of highly acclaimed and award-winning short films and music videos, has definitely given him a place among the authentic and profound voice of contemporary cinema. The film that had its premiere at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. It is an introspective experience that encompasses elements of speculative fiction and spiritual sci-fi that explore the deeper questions of who and what we are and the timeless quest of humans to find purpose and connection in the external world.

Nine Days is an emotionally-charged and exquisite film set in a single location with its genre conceit dealing with a man tasked with interviewing souls where each soul strives to prove their right to existence. The pre-life reality envisioned by Oda is grounded in reality with physical existence and physical environment, in what seems like a parallel dimension, where chosen ones are given life on Earth while the rejected ones are erased from their short-term and provisional existence. This evocative and thought-provoking film is an elaborate metaphor on how souls are selected for the responsibility of life based on their unique characteristics and choices that make them human.

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One can distinctly discern Oda’s inspiration of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life (1998) and Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011) as well as a passing resemblance to Pixar’s animated film Soul (2020) that also explores the ‘before-life’ or the world of unborn souls. It is also a personal project for Oda as it was also inspired by the suicide of his uncle when he was just 12 years old.

High On Films in collaboration with Avanté

This article attempts to explain some of the aspects of the film that requires more clarity and tries to throw some light into the deeper meaning the film puts forward for its viewers. Refrain from reading and save it for later if you haven’t watched the movie as the write-up may contain spoilers . Those who have experienced this soulful meditation, keep reading!

NINE DAYS SYNOPSIS & SUMMARY:

Will, the arbiter of the primordial purgatory.

“Nine Days” opens with Will (Winston Duke), an arbiter of souls or the gatekeeper of the primordial purgatory, observing the live POV of different individuals he had previously picked to receive the gift of life on multiple television sets stacked on each other in his living room. He tracks the days and takes down detailed notes about their everyday life, their high point and hardships, and records them on VHS tapes which are kept in a room of filing cabinets.

Will is particularly interested in the life of a 28-year-old woman named Amanda Grazzini, a violinist and prodigy , whose life plays out in snippets at the beginning of the film. He records her as intellectually curious, fearless, and joyful, outgoing personality, and a prodigy while the key moments from her life are shown literally through her eyes. With the harmonic tone of the violin in the background (composed by Antonio Pinto), we see Amanda as a child, her loving parents, choosing violin from an assortment of toys, playing in the muddy water, painting a picture, celebrating her birthday, performing in a violin concerto, graduating, learning music notes, cycling through the streets, dancing with her friends, and rehearsing for a big concert.

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Will also notices Rick Virgil, a 14-year-old boy who experiences relentless bullying at the hands of his classmates, Luiza Crolin attending her last dance class before her wedding, and Fernando Pereira in his wheelchair practicing at the shooting range. At nighttime, she switches off each of the TV sets but listens to Amanda playing her violin late in the night. Will lives in a slightly shabby home with a white picket fence in the middle of an ambiguous, desolate desert with distance nondescript mountains in the background, and a completely flat landscape surrounding the homestead. And Will’s only companion is Kyo (Benedict Wong), a friendly co-worker who assists Will during interviews and also watches and critiques the actions of the individuals on the television screen.

TRAGEDY STRIKES: THE ARRIVAL OF NEW SOULS

On the day of the concerto, Will and Kyo witnesses in the grainy first-person footage instead of driving her car to give the grand performance, Amanda drives too fast on the highway and crashes into an overpass, and dies. Amanda’s death haunts Will as she had never exhibited signs of depression or suicidal tendencies and becomes obsessed with trying to understand why she died by searching for answers in the footage. While mourning, Will also comes to terms with the fact that he has to choose a replacement to fill the new vacancy left by Amanda.

Soon, the unborn souls in human form begin to arrive at Will’s residence and Will has the monumental task of selecting a soul in nine days. Will makes it clear to the candidates that he is not “the boss” or God and describes himself as “a cog in the wheel.” When a candidate asks Will about the difference between being there and being alive, he says, “Any feeling, sensation, emotion is much less intense here.” And he is sure of this because Will has previous experience as a living person. Will was also chosen by an interviewer just like himself.

The notable five candidates out of the nine include Maria (Arianna Ortiz), the shy romantic who develops a crush on Will, Mike (David Rysdahl), a sensitive and anxious artist, Alexander (Tony Hale), a wisecracking and friendly man who ignores the ugly side of living, Kane (Bill Skarsgard), the serious pragmatic, and Emma (Zazie Beetz), an inquisitive free-spirited optimistic woman. go through a nine-day audition process.

What is the Nine Days audition process like?

Will has designed his nine-day elimination interview process rigorously which consists of comparative hypothetical situations and moral challenges. Their first task is to answer a hypothetical scenario set in a concentration camp where one has to choose between killing his/her son or having the whole camp killed because he tried to escape. The answers vary but the latecomer Emma refuses to answer the question and he notices that she is different from others.

When the souls who survived the first day come to Will’s residence on the second day, he shows them around the house and makes them aware of the lay of the land. He gives them each a notebook to record what they like or dislike based on what they see in the different television sets. It showcases how the chosen souls go about their lives and it is an opportunity for them to see what it means to be alive. As the assignment progresses, Will eliminates those souls which lack the requirements or qualifications to be born on Earth. The terminated souls will vanish into the ether, their existences snuffed out almost as quickly as they began. Will offers them the opportunity to live one moment of their choosing before they are vanquished into the unknown as a parting gift.

The first to get eliminated is Mike because he has a troubled and anxious personality who showed vulnerability and a lack of confidence. It is highlighted when Will asked him to show what he had written in his notebook. Mike tried to hide his work but when he finally allows Will to see what Mike had written, he finds a beautiful drawing of a beach in his notebook. When Will asked Mike if he liked what he drew, Mike responded, “No, I hate it.” and made Will promise not to let anyone see it. By showing self-hatred and distrust in his own creation as well as for himself, he is not a fit candidate who can survive life on Earth. When Mike is informed that he had not been chosen, he agrees to Will’s decision by remarking that he was not “good enough” for the real world. Mike chooses a day at the beach and Will and Kyo replicate a virtual reality beach scene with a pile of sand and gently lapping surf which delights Mike.

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Will continues to ask several hypothetical questions to the candidates. He asks Emma what she would do when she becomes a witness to someone getting bullied, asks Kane what he would do if he found 500 dollars in a wallet in the street, asks Alexander what he would do if his mother makes cookies for his brother but not for him, and asks Maria what she will do if she learns that she only has six months to live. The answers are emblematic of their real character and personality.

The next to get eliminated is Maria, an eternal romantic who is drawn to the feeling of love in the world. She spends her time observing the romantic lives on the television and even develops a seemingly unreciprocated love interest towards Will. Will notices this expression of love as Maria’s vulnerability as it would stand as an obstacle for the fulfilment of life in the real world. She goes to extend of expressing her feelings for Will aware of the fact that it would likely make her ineligible for the chance of life. When Will lets her know about her fate, she begins to cry hysterically begging for another chance. But Will is helpless and fulfils her desire of riding a bike down a street.

Kyo and Will set up a set of screens and a projector along with a stationary bike and she mounts the bike with headphones experiencing the street noises and the petals of the flower in her face. After Maria, Will also finds Alexander to be unfit for the position because of his laidback, easygoing ways and lack of empathy who just want to have beers and hang out. When he informs Alexander, he reacts angrily alluding to Will’s hypocrisy for judging people when he has never performed anything meaningful in his own life. When Will offers to recreate a moment for him, he refuses and goes out into the deserted landscape to meet the fate of the rejected souls.

WILL’S PERSISTENT QUEST FOR ANSWERS

Alongside the storyline of the selection of the best soul from five contenders, there is Will at the center of the narrative trying to find the reason for Amanda’s suicide. Will’s quest of Amanda’s sudden death throws light into his own past life on Earth. Will once had been alive and was unfit to live in the world by his own standards and ended up committing suicide.

When Emma insists on knowing more about Will, Kyo, the assistant of sorts, says that he had watched Will when he was alive and described him as “Talented, but struggled his whole life to fit into a world different from him. Did have love inside him. Maybe too much. Too much love, no one to give it to.” And that shows the reason why he rejected Maria because the love he gave to the world only brought sadness, pain, and suffering for him. Will was not liked by those around him and he developed a feeling of self-loathing and worthlessness. Will rejected Mike because he doesn’t want Mike to experience the same hatred and contempt which was inside him.

Nine Days Movie Explained - Wills Search for Answers

Will is obsessively watching the tapes of Amanda to decipher the reasoning for her death, but everything turns futile. He tells Kyo that Amanda had bad moments but she handled them well. And he also tells that she rarely cried and only did when she played the violin. And Will suspects and wonders out loud if there was a part of his favorite soul that she was always hiding. With the help of a nearby interviewer Colleen who gave life to Amanda’s cousin Cecily,

Will finds the existence of a suicide note left behind by Amanda before the crash. The note said, “My soul was born without an immune system. My heart was too open and I didn’t know how to protect it. I’m sorry that my smile wasn’t a smile, just a mask.” Will is distressed because he couldn’t see a warning sign watching her for twenty-eight years and considers it his own failure. Kyo tries to convince Will that he couldn’t have done anything to change her fate but he still hurts because he was the one who sent Amanda to the “shithole” to survive. Will burns Amanda’s file and prepares himself for the final selection. Who will have the chance for life – Emma or Kane?

NINE DAYS MOVIE ENDING EXPLAINED:

The verdict – survival of the fittest.

As Will prepares himself for the final verdict, Kyo argues for Emma as she is full of life and hope even though she resists the mind games of Will. But Will decides to choose Kane instead since he doesn’t want another soul to be a prey or victim like Amanda whom he let down by choosing her. On the last day, a delicious dinner is served where everyone shares a disgusting story. Kane shares a news story he watched on television about two middle-school who went missing but were later found to be raped and murdered by their 60-year-old English teacher and buried in his backyard. And when asked about why he did it, he said he was in love with them. Emma argues with Kane for telling a tragic story and they differ in their worldview as Emma has noticed only the good the world has to offer while Kane watched the evil things happening in the world where someone hurts someone else every single day. Emma, in contrast, shares a funny story involving a woman and a gigantic mass of poop.

As the last task, Will asks both Emma and Kane to tell why the other person doesn’t deserve to be alive. Emma walks out without answering and gets rejected and Kane, the rationalist, is chosen to be born, to have a new beginning. When Will offers Emma the last experience, she writes down something in the paper which Will refuses to do. It was the performance Will did in his high school as part of a theatre group when he became one with everyone who was watching when he felt he was no longer invisible.

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Emma declines the last experience and decides to walk out alone. Will later finds a note left by Emma in which she thanks him for the nine days. She also feels sorry for him that life hadn’t gone the way he wanted and he had experienced a lot of pain in his life. She wrote all the beautiful moments and memories she had experienced during the nine days. Will finds all the happy memories written all over the house. Regretfully, he searches for Emma and finds her walking through the desert. He fulfills her last desire by passionately rendering selections from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” which celebrates the self and appreciates life on Earth.

NINE DAYS MOVIE THEMES EXPLAINED:

The study of free will and the human condition.

Nine Days offers a critical study of self-determinism and the existentialist perception of the human condition. Will, the selector of soul, decides the right candidate to be born, acting as the judge and jury. However, the chosen soul or the one gifted with life exercise free will in their choices that fulfill their desires. Will, as the proxy of God or the supreme being, chooses souls which meet the criteria to survive on Earth, but he also fails because the actions of a self are determined by itself.

Amanda was the pride and joy of Will and he was proud when she performed in big concerts. But she was alone and isolated in the world and chooses to end her life. Another soul chosen by Will named Rick gets bullied often and eventually responds with retaliatory violence. Though Will gives them a fruitful environment of creativity and love, the social surrounding and one’s own actions define the human condition. It raises concerns and concerns about the divine as Will as the emissary or stand-in of God cannot control the fate of the individuals. It also scrutinizes Will’s distress when he watches how these souls fare in this cruel and merciless world where Will himself was a victim. The souls who are endowed with reason and conscience are free to follow their hearts to carry out sinful choices or virtuous actions.

APPRECIATE THE SIMPLE THINGS OF LIFE

Nine Days is a reminder to appreciate the improbability of our existence and the need to appreciate and celebrate the simple things in life. Emma’s character symbolizes the need to celebrate the happy memories and moments one can experience in the world. In her limited time of existence, that is nine days, she chooses to focus on the little things in life and is thankful for her transient life.

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Emma with her unending positivity and childlike optimism finds happiness in making others happy. She probes into the life of Will and tries to find what made him unemotional and detached and even provides him with a glimpse of joy when her happy memories are shared with him for which he says thank you by reciting the monologue. Emma is someone who wants you to believe that existence is grace and life is a miracle even when we have to suffer on the battlefield of life. We also witness the rejected souls appreciating the beauty of life when they enjoy riding a bike on a street or a day on the beach.

ADDRESSING THE AMBIGUOUS ELEMENTS AND QUESTIONS

The film raises several ambiguous and enigmatic questions about Oda’s worldbuilding which are left to the imagination of the spectators. It is unaddressed where the souls come from and where they go when they are denied existence. It is also left unanswered about the past tragic life of Will and how he became “a cog in the wheel”. The spectators are also directionless on what happens after the souls are chosen though Will tells Kane that he will feel his senses becoming unbearably sharper and stronger and that he will forget Will and whatever has happened in the primordial purgatory. But Will is given the affirmation that “you’ll still be you” indicating that souls arrive on Earth with their attitudes and sensibilities in place. Another uninvestigated aspect is why Amanda is the only soul who remembered Will in her childhood when she drew a painting of him and called him a friend.

Another intriguing question is raised by Kyo when asks Will at one point: “What if we, the watchers, are being watched somewhere else by another set of watchers, who are likewise being watched? And so on and so forth, all the way up?” Kyo’s sudden epiphany makes us question the hierarchies involved in the cycle of life. It also delves into the question of whether we are living an existence of voyeurism where we are constantly watched and judged by a figure like Will who has chosen us. The film also asks questions about the nature and meaning of being, what makes life worthy of living, and the merits and drawbacks of the depth of sensibility and awareness.

In this layered metaphorical exploration of existence, Oda addresses the spiritual and existential question – who gets born and why? This cerebrally-stirring film gives a novel turn to the natural selection of Darwin by making Will the authority who picks the souls through different strategies. It can also be read as Oda’s relationship with cinema as it imparts wisdom about existence through innumerable lives just like the candidates learned about existence and different lives through the television screen. This deeply cathartic and empathetic narrative is a tearjerker that would melt even the unfeeling souls with its wonderful score and imaginative existentialism.

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Nine Days Parent Guide

To be...or not.

In Theaters: Will has an unusual job: interviewing prospective souls who want to be born on Earth. The candidates will have to pass nine days of difficult tasting in order to qualify for the opportunity - and it won't be quite what any of them anticipated.

Release date August 13, 2021

Run Time: 124 minutes

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The guide to our grades, parent movie review by kirsten hawkes.

When Amanda’s car slams into a concrete wall, Will is devastated. Desperate to see if he missed any clues, he pores over the last days of her life, listening to her violin concerto over and over and reviewing images of her joyous, creative life. But Will is no ordinary friend: He’s the person who sent Amanda to earth. And he’s responsible for selecting the new soul who will go to earth to fill the vacancy left by Amanda’s death.

Six souls come to Will to “audition” in this high-stakes test. After nine days, Will is going to choose one to be born: the other five will cease to exist. Will questions them, gives them scenarios to think about, and has them watch the wall of televisions that show life through the eyes of everyone he’s sent to earth. The candidates ponder life on earth: physical experiences, natural beauty, joy, injustice, and suffering. And Will tries to figure out which of them will be best suited to being a “success” in mortality.

Will is not a god-like character; he’s very human, with his own demons and uncertainties. Of all the movie’s characters, he alone has lived on earth, and his sufferings have left him with baggage that burdens him as he tries to make his decision. His empathy makes him suffer along with the people he sent to earth and he is haunted by Amanda’s death. He rages to his friend, Kyo, “I send flowers [to earth] and other people send pigs to eat them.” Desperate to prevent more suffering, he is torn about whether he should send to earth a person with an overflowing heart and the capacity for beauty and wonder or if he should send a pragmatist who will be able to survive in the face of harsh realities. His care for the candidates is palpable and that affection is transmitted to the audience, making the end of each soul heartbreaking.

Given its topic, it comes as a surprise that Nine Days is not a religious film. This story is told in isolation, without a philosophical or religious framework. Will describes himself as a “cog in the wheel” and is part of a system that no one explains. We never learn where the auditioning souls come from, and there is no elaboration on why Will is doing his job or if other departed people also continue to exist in some form. If you’re looking for some kind of existential guidance, you won’t find it here.

What you will find in this film is an intensely human story focused on the preciousness of our fleeting years on this planet. There are a few content issues – just under 20 swear words, some bathroom humor, a character who seems intoxicated – that will push the movie out of family movie night. But, frankly, this film is far too complex for kids or tweens. Older teens might enjoy it, especially if they enjoy grappling with philosophical or religious questions. As for adults, Nine Days is a solid choice for anyone who wants to be reminded of the mystery and beauty of life.

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Kirsten hawkes, watch the trailer for nine days.

Nine Days Rating & Content Info

Why is Nine Days rated R? Nine Days is rated R by the MPAA for language.

Violence: Scenes of a boy being bullied at school. He finally fights back and someone is seen badly hurt. A person commits suicide by driving into a cement wall. The scene is replayed more than once. People are put in an imagined scenario where they are expected to determine if they will kill a child to save others. A man suggests (not seriously) that someone cut off his genitals. There’s brief mention of poisoning someone. A man is shot and paralyzed as a result. A man deliberately hurts another to make a point. Characters fade into nothing and cease to exist. A man sets fire to VHS tapes. There’s mention of teens being raped and murdered. Sexual Content: There are a few scenes of people kissing. Profanity: There are approximately eight sexual expletives, eight scatological curses, and three terms of deity. Alcohol / Drug Use: People drink beer while they chat. A man drinks beer and seems to be inebriated. A man tells a story about a drunk vomiting. People drink beer and wine with dinner.

Page last updated February 24, 2022

Nine Days Parents' Guide

What do you believe about the purpose of life? Do you believe you existed in some form before birth? Do you think your life has value to others? What do you think you can do to make life better for other people?

Do you think Will made the right choice? What do you think motivated his choice? Who would you have chosen to come to earth? Why?

Nine Days (United States, 2020)

The storyline bears a passing resemblance to the one used by Pixar for last year’s Soul . Both films deal with the existential possibility of life before birth and what “qualifications” might result in a pre-soul being granted the opportunity to be born. Soul does a better job with the material than Nine Days , perhaps because the former film is more concerned with developing characters and telling a story than pursuing a metaphysical approach. Oda has claimed that his movie was inspired by Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life and Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life and it’s easy to see the influences, but those films were more firmly anchored in their own realities and had better-developed narrative frameworks.

Nine Days transpires in a limbo of sorts where a lonely caretaker named Will (Winston Duke) lives in an isolated house in the middle of a desert. With the exception of occasional visits from his friend Kyo (Benedict Wong), he is by himself. He spends most of his day sitting in front of a bank of CRT monitors, peering into the lives of others. At first, we mistake him for a voyeur, but it gradually becomes clear he’s much more. Will’s job is to screen candidates to determine which selections should be sent to Earth to be born. Seemingly, Will’s only qualification for the job is that he once “lived,” although the details of his time in a corporeal body were less-than-happy. The people he watches on the TVs are the ones he sent to be born. Then, his greatest success, a concert violinist named Amanda, commits suicide. Will is devastated and begins to doubt everything about himself, his duty, and the meaning of life. And, while trying to figure out why Amanda killed herself and how he was unaware of a problem, he must choose her replacement.

Nine Days is rich in ideas although some of its thematic material isn’t as deep as Oda believes it to be. Nevertheless, the movie provokes thoughts about the meaning of life, the importance of the present moment, and the question of whether human beings are inherently good and moral individuals (with the miscreants being outliers) or vile monsters (with those who practice kindness as exceptions). At one point, Will laments that he selects flowers while others send pigs to eat them up. The acting is strong, with Winston Duke imbuing Will with a soul-sickness that we feel as much as observe.

Nine Days is likely to appeal to those who prefer experimental explorations into philosophical arenas and don’t mind a dose of pretentiousness. Those who have an affinity for more traditional, narrative-driven motion pictures may be frustrated by the experience. Although Oda’s debut offers glimpses of a potentially gifted director, the project feels unfinished and fails to match his impressive vision with an equally compelling story.

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Nine Days movie review & film summary (2021)
The strength of "Nine Days" is not so much the scenario (although that is imaginative and well-constructed) but the mood Oda sets, the clarity with which he establishes this world, how it operates, its rules and traditions. There is a score by Antonio Pinto but it drops out for long stretches.
Nine Days
Nine Days: Movie Clip - Maybe You'll Find Out. CLIP 1:03 Nine Days: Trailer 1. Nine Days: Trailer 1. TRAILER 2:04 View All Videos. Nine Days Photos
'Nine Days' Review: Belief in the Beforelife
Duke and Beetz in particular deliver performances for the ages. And the movie's inquiries, about ethics, morality, consciousness and the ability to hang on in this brief crack of light we're ...
Nine Days review
Nine Days review - profound supernatural drama. S evere behind his wire-rimmed spectacles but more emotionally engaged than he would care to admit, Will (Winston Duke) bears a great ...
Nine Days
Nine Days is, in its subdued way, a profound and powerful commentary on life. Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 20, 2021. Although arguably a smidge too ponderous and self-serious for its ...
Movie Review: 'Nine Days,' Starring 'Black Panther' Star Winston Duke
'Nine Days' stars Winston Duke as a man who interviews souls for the chance to be born, ... TV & Movies; TV & Movies Reviews; More News. Shecky Greene, Legendary Las Vegas Comedian, Dead at 97
Nine Days review
Movies. This article is more than 2 years old. Review. Nine Days review - flavoursome metaphysical fable of souls queueing up to be born. This article is more than 2 years old.
Nine Days
Generally Favorable Based on 25 Critic Reviews. 72. 80% Positive 20 Reviews. 20% Mixed 5 Reviews. 0% Negative 0 Reviews. All Reviews; Positive Reviews; ... Nine Days is the sort of original cinematic art that, these days, is few and far between. ... A movie this well-crafted, thoughtful, and sad comes along once in a while. ...
Nine Days review: Existential drama about unborn souls competing for
Nine Days, the feature filmmaking debut for São Paulo-born, LA-based director Edson Oda, is the latest to ponder this metaphysical terrain: it's the story of a pre-mortal bureaucrat, Will ...
Nine Days (2021)
Movie Review - Nine Days (2021) Nine Days, 2021. Written and Directed by Edson Oda. Starring Winston Duke, Zazie Beetz, Bill Skarsgård, Benedict Wong, Tony Hale, David Rysdahl, Geraldine Hughes ...
Movie Review: 'Nine Days' is emotionally powerful and profound
'Nine Days' is emotionally powerful and profound. Directors: Edson Oda Writers: Edson Oda Stars: Winston Duke, Zazie Beetz, Benedict Wong, Tony Hale, Bill Skarsgård Synopsis: A man interviews five unborn souls to determine which one can be given life on Earth. [/info] Nine Days look through its own highly contemplative lens of love, fear, hate, anger, pride, disgust, and joy to view each ...
Nine Days (2020)
Nine Days: Directed by Edson Oda. With Winston Duke, Zazie Beetz, Bill Skarsgård, Benedict Wong. A reclusive man conducts a series of interviews with human souls for a chance to be born.
'Nine Days' Review
'Nine Days': Film Review | Sundance 2020. Winston Duke stars in 'Nine Days,' Edson Oda's feature debut about a man tasked with interviewing souls for the chance to be sent out into life.
Nine Days Review: A Jarring, Soulful Meditation On The Intensity Of
Published Jul 30, 2021. Thoughtful and hauntingly beautiful in style and treatment, Nine Days emerges as a sublime slice of cinema that sincerely tugs at the heartstrings. Cinema helps audiences unravel the many layers of life and understand what existence essentially means, providing a glimpse into things often overlooked.
Nine Days
09 August 2021. With its mere concept, Edson Oda 's feature film debut, Nine Days, certainly had the potential of falling victim to an avalanche of clichés that would only be further piled on with winces and eye rolls from the audience. However, the way Oda confidently composes and presents the film to us, he is careful not to portray the ...
Nine Days REVIEW
Nine Days from Edson Oda is a stunning debut for a director and also one of the best movies of 2021 so far. PC; PS5; ... We cover gaming news, movie reviews, wrestling and much more. Verdict.
Nine Days Movie Review
Parents need to know that Nine Days is a beautiful, mysterious fantasy/drama about a metaphysical way station where a man named Will (Winston Duke, of Black Panther) chooses a soul to be given life.Language is the biggest issue, with uses of "f--k," "s--t," "ass," "damn," "pissed," and "d--k." There are also some violent images, including guns and shooting, brief bloody wounds, a child being ...
Nine Days
Conclusion. For all its spiritual underpinnings, Nine Days is a humanistic fable—one trying to puzzle out meaning and fulfilment in a life freighted with pain, and in a life where the prospect of a loving, involved God feels uncertain. In fact, in the movie's telling, the "afterlife" is a place muted—not dead, but deadened.
Nine Days (film)
Nine Days is a 2020 American fantasy drama film written and directed by Edson Oda in his feature debut. It stars an ensemble cast consisting of Winston Duke, Zazie Beetz, Benedict Wong, Tony Hale, Bill Skarsgård, David Rysdahl, and Arianna Ortiz.In the film, Will (Duke) is a reclusive man residing in a house in the pre-existence with his assistant Kyo (Wong).
Nine Days (2021) Movie Reviews
Buy Pixar movie tix to unlock Buy 2, ... Nine Days (2021) Critic Reviews and Ratings Powered by Rotten Tomatoes Rate Movie. Close Audience Score. The percentage of users who made a verified movie ticket purchase and rated this 3.5 stars or higher. Learn more. Review Submitted. GOT IT ...
Nine Days Movie Explained: Why Did Amanda Kill herself?
Nine Days Movie Ending Explained & Themes Analyzed: Japanese Brazilian writer-director Edson Oda's ambitious debut feature Nine Days (2020) is a metaphysical humanist drama that deals with the pre-existence of the soul, the existentialist perception of the human condition, and the meaning of life. Oda's leap into feature filmmaking, after a series of highly acclaimed and award-winning ...
Nine Days Movie Review for Parents
Nine Days Rating & Content Info Why is Nine Days rated R? Nine Days is rated R by the MPAA for language. Violence: Scenes of a boy being bullied at school. He finally fights back and someone is seen badly hurt. A person commits suicide by driving into a cement wall. The scene is replayed more than once.
Nine Days
Nine Days (United States, 2020) August 05, 2021. A movie review by James Berardinelli. Edson Oda's debut feature, Nine Days, is a pure allegory; the film works as an extended philosophical rumination but fails as a story. Although interesting in many aspects, Nine Days is as often frustrating as it is compelling, and the denouement feels forced.
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