Edson Oda’s none-too-subtle “Nine Days,” was a wildly ambitious, but pretentious, narrative feature won the screenwriting award at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. If its watered-down and simplified philosophy about life and death may have worked for some, I found it completely nauseating to sit through. Occurring in some purgatory-like place where people’s souls make a pit stop between life and death, Will (Winston Duke) heads a program to choose who will go on and be born with life and who will ultimately fall by the wayside. The candidates have nine days to prove their worth to Will. The Brazilian-born Oda is filled with ideas, albeit rather clunky ones, and in his feature directing debut chooses to go big or go home with his story, a metaphysical jaunt into a Bresson-inspired unknown. Sure, a movie like “Nine Days” must be commended in its unadorned artistic aim for the skies, but the execution is rather clunky. Will, haunted by the apparent suicide of one of the souls he granted life to, does his own bout of “soul searching” in an isolated cabin at a dessert-like Utopia. It’s there where he watches lives unfurl, via VHS tapes no less, on old-school TV screens. You’d think such an advanced world, able to grant breathing life to individuals, would have better technology at its disposal. [D]
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