Nine Days, the first feature-length film from Brazilian writer-director Edson Oda, is a movie that forces the viewer to ask the big questions. Why are we here? What does a good life look like, and how do you achieve it?
These questions are posed through the story of Will (Winston Duke), who lives in a small yellow house in what appears to be an endless desert. Although it’s never explicitly spelled out for us, we quickly pick up on the fact that Will’s plane of existence is somewhere before life begins.
Similar to Pixar’s Soul, this movie introduces us to souls who have not yet been born. But unlike Soul, Nine Days is a somber affair. Will’s job is not to prepare souls for life on Earth but to make sure that only the right ones get a chance to go there.
Will is a sort of cosmic interviewer, inviting souls who show up at his doorstep to apply for what he calls the “opportunity of a life.” Over a cycle that lasts nine days, Will puts a cohort of candidates through the wringer, which includes asking them hypothetical questions about tense situations they could encounter on Earth. At the end of the cycle, Will picks a soul that gets to live its life. The rest disappear as if they never existed in the first place.
Although Will is soft-spoken and even-keeled, with all of the grace you’d hope to see from a celestial being, there’s a certain intensity behind his questions. That intensity, we learn, is the result of how he spends his days when he’s not interviewing potential human beings.
Will, it turns out, spends hours watching a panel of televisions featuring first-person perspectives of the souls he’s dispatched to life. Far from acting the disinterested observer, Will develops a strong emotional bond with, and feeling of responsibility for, these Earth dwellers. Their pain is his pain.
He’s assisted in this mission of vetting candidates by Kyo (Benedict Wong), who serves as both an assistant in the functional tasks Will must perform and a loyal friend who can provide him with reality checks — one being that Will cannot control the lives of the people he allows to be born. No matter how well he vets them, he is powerless to ensure that they live happy, useful, or meaningful lives.
The futility of the task, however, doesn’t stop him from trying. To test their readiness for the rigors of life, he asks his souls what they would do if they were living in a concentration camp and had to choose between killing their own son or allowing the entire camp to be slaughtered because he had tried to escape. One soul, Emma (Zazie Beetz) frustrates Will by refusing to answer the question. As Kyo later informs her, Will is special in that he, unlike Kyo and the souls who visit the tiny yellow home, once walked the Earth as a human being. He has seen the good and the bad firsthand.
It is life’s tragedies, both those he experienced himself and the ones he watches on the television screens, that sit with Will the most. While his wall of televisions features plenty of joys, including boisterous weddings and days at the beach, Will is haunted by the horrors he sees, such as a puzzling suicide committed by one of the people he sent to Earth. He watches these over and over, wondering how he could’ve missed the warning signs that one of his souls would take a wrong turn in their life.
It’s hardly a surprise, then, that Will warms more quickly to candidates he sees as stoic and tough — people who can handle themselves in a scrape and push through life’s toughest challenges. Kane (Bill Skarsgard), for instance, impresses Will with his acknowledgment of life’s evils and the need to challenge them. Those whom Will sees as fragile are quickly shown the door. These are painful moments for the souls, each of whom is desperate to be born. As Will tells them one by one that they haven’t been chosen, some respond with sadness, others with rage. But unlike many of the other interviewers who exist in this world, Will takes pains to give each soul a send-off that includes simulating one experience from Earth that appeals most to them.
While the Bachelor-style elimination of candidates until only one soul is left standing is one of the movie’s obvious plot points, the other involves Will himself. It is the candidates who are being evaluated, but eventually, Will’s stubborn refusal to talk about his time on Earth is itself put on trial. Emma, Kyo, and the other candidates push him to acknowledge his past, and in the process, the plot asks us, the viewers, to face ourselves with the same level of courage and honesty. Although the film ultimately does not answer all the existential questions it poses, it forces us to think about the meaning of our lives in the way few other recent films have.
Through adept acting, a haunting score by Antonio Pinto (who has composed for a range of films including 2002’s City of God), and stunning imagery (the deserts of Utah form the backdrop of most of the film), Nine Days invokes many of the same feelings as a religious experience. Oda reportedly was inspired by his late uncle, who committed suicide at the age of 50. “When I was writing Nine Days, I was pretty much trying to reconnect with my uncle and … instead of judging him through what he did … trying to see the life that he lived,” he said.
Whether it’s through the televisions Will sits and watches every day, Kyo’s musings, or the curiosity of the candidates who show up at his door, Nine Days asks us to think deeply about why we’re here on this Earth and what we should do to make the best of it, no matter who we are or where we were born.
Zaid Jilani is a freelance journalist.
