This Forgotten 2020 Fantasy Movie With 3 Marvel Stars Will Leave You In Tears

Back in 1998, Japanese master Hirokazu Kore-Eda released “After Life,” which presented a novel take on, well, the afterlife. In that film, dead souls gather in a quaint, summer-camp-like enclave and are told that they have a few days to think of their most cherished memory. They will soon ascend, you see, and they are only permitted to take one memory into the great beyond. The summer camp staff consists of filmmakers who make short films of the dead’s memories. When a dead person watches the movie of their memories in the dark, they will vanish, using the magic of cinema to equate eternity. It’s one of the best movies of the 1990s. 

In 2020, Brazilian filmmaker Edson Oda made his feature directorial debut with “Nine Days,” which seems to be the inverse of “After Life.” In “Nine Days,” Winston Duke (from the “Black Panther” movies) plays a pre-life curator named Will who interviews souls who aim to be incarnated on Earth as real people. He vets them by showing them old-school video footage of happy or tragic moments of humanity and gauges their reactions. He can also dock them points for a displayed lack of empathy or an overabundance of self-consciousness. The application process takes nine days. 

If souls fail, they get one human experience before being deleted from existence. If they pass, they are born. Call it “Before Life.” In the world of “Nine Days,” when someone dies on Earth, a pre-born soul can claim their “vacancy.” Zazie Beetz (from “Deadpool 2”) plays Emma, a hopeful soul, and Benedict Wong (from “Doctor Strange”) plays Kyo, Will’s assistant. Bill Skarsgård plays Kane, Emma’s closest competitor. We covered the film when its trailer was released.

Will, it seems, isn’t a very good judge of character, however. He once lived on Earth and remembers all the pain and tragedy that come with life. That has made him a little too cautious and stringent when judging others. He is obsessed with the short life of one Amanda (Lisa Starrett), the dead woman whose shoes Emma and Kane are applying to fill. Will is very much drawn to this mysterious Amanda, and he learns more and more about the tragedy of her short life (cut short by a car crash) throughout the movie. Will is wrestling with the fact that he is tasked with selecting others to have “meaningful” lives, while his own life might have been lived without meaning or passion. 

For a hint as to the tone of the film, Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” is quoted at length. For the poetry layperson, that’s the one that has the famous line “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.” No one contained more than Whitman, and reading his poetry is a surefire way to be inspired. 

In an episode of “The Takeaway” podcast, Winston Duke said he liked the script for “Nine Days” because of its themes of depression and despair. He and director Edson Oda developed a great rapport, resulting in a four-hour conversation about the script, as well as life and art. Duke, very fond of the movie, also talked about it with EW and noted that the film also connected to mourning practices in the Caribbean (Duke is from Trinidad and Tobago). It was very personal for the actor, it seems. 

“Nine Days” slipped by most people, earning less than $100,000 on a $10 million budget. It seems that it was one of the many victims of COVID, released in the late summer of 2021. It was already on home video by November. 

But while it was a commercial failure, the film was a big hit critically, earning a 90% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 158 reviews. Carlos Aguilar, writing for the Los Angeles Times, wrote that the film is dripping with longing (or “saudade” in the director’s native Portuguese), calling the movie “a life-affirming epiphany,” and “cinema of a higher calling, spiritual without denomination.”

Sheila O’Malley, on RogerEbert.com, gave the film three-and-a-half stars (out of four), writing her astonishment that the direction was so assured and wise, coming as it did from a first-time feature filmmaker. She wrote that Oda was:

“…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.”

O’Malley noted that a premise like the one seen in “Nine Days” might teeter dangerously into sentimentality, and that its only flaw is that it does emerge as treacly from time to time. But she also compared it to classics like “Defending Your Life” and even Akira Kurosawa’s “Ikiru,” and that’s no small praise. “Ikiru” is, without hyperbole, one of the best movies ever made.