YNOT at the Movies

Most films about exotic creatures outside of earth rely heavily on flashy visuals created by computer-generated images (CGI). Although nothing is wrong with that approach, the Japanese-Brazilian writer-director Edson Oda took a completely different path in his intelligent feature directorial debut "Nine Days" (USA 2020 | 124 min.). It unfolds a nine-day-long process of selecting a soul to be born into a human life on earth. It's a thought-provoking reflection on human life and our own existence, and the souls simply take the form of human beings.

Sitting in a dark room with a wall of TV monitors, Will (Winston Duke) meticulously takes notes about each individual's life on earth shot from their respective point of views, and he also records some moments of their lives on VHS tapes (remember those?). Will has a helper Kyo (Benedict Wong) who has never lived on earth. The seemingly dull and endless process is carried out inside an outpost in the middle of a dessert, which is not on earth.

When one young musician suddenly dies on one of the monitors, several souls come to Will's door to apply for the newly opened opportunity to be born on earth. As if a psychotherapist going through a series of sessions with patients, Will meets with each candidate and constantly asks intriguing and sometimes challenging questions. We don't know what quality Will is looking for from these souls or why he has the power to decide who should be the one to be born on earth, but the decision is going to be made within nine days, and some souls may be eliminated even sooner.

If a soul fails to be selected, perhaps taking a cue from Hirokazu Koreeda's "After Life" (ワンダフルライフ | Japan 1998), Will offers such unsuitable soul to pick one moment from the life on earth documented in his VHS tapes. Will and Kyo will then try their best to recreate the selected moment for the soul to experience, before sending it off to oblivion.

When interacting with a variety of souls with different psychological profiles, Will appears to have the authority and commanding power over the souls. But his power is challenged when one soul named Emma (Zazie Beetz) forces Will to reevaluate his perspective about life on earth and the meaning of his own existence.

With a high concept and a philosophical mindset, the director Edson Oda made a brilliant and refreshing sci-fi film that has no high-tech CGI (actually involving quite low-tech VHS) but plenty of mesmerizing visuals. He asks many hard questions that we should ask ourselves and invites the audience to be one of the souls to take a look at human lives from a different perspective.

What should one see in a living person? What does it mean to be alive? What's in humanity? Who should decide if a soul deserves to be reborn, if that can actually happen?

Edson Oda doesn't quite answer all of these questions in his film, but he repeatedly lets his characters confront these intriguing thoughts. Gradually, he builds the story into a climax, in which Winston Duke delivers an exhilarating performance that is nothing short of operatic with a Shakespearean gravity.

"Nine Days" opens on Friday, August 6, 2021 in the San Francisco Bay Area.