WARNING: This article on Nine Days contains discussion of suicide.

In the opening scenes of Nine Days, a man (played by Winston Duke) living in a house in the middle of nowhere monitors a wall of TVs broadcasting first-person perspectives from what we can assume are other people. The man records these first-person feeds on VHS tapes and keeps extensive notes and files on these people. He mostly works alone, though one other man (Benedict Wong) occasionally pops in. Then, disaster strikes on one of the TVs: a violinist dies in a car crash, seemingly not by accident, and the TV goes blank.

It's with all this mysterious set-up that we finally get to the main premise of the movie. Figuring this out just from watching is compelling in its own right, so for those compelled to watch this movie going in completely blind, stop reading here, but the trailer already tells you the premise, and it's impossible to discuss the movie without dealing with it, so let's proceed with this not-really-a-spoiler. Duke's character is a soul who was once alive but is no longer, and his job is to test a batch of newly created souls to determine which of them will fill the dead violinist's absence and get a chance at life. (Sudden realization when writing it out: yes, this is basically a more logical version of making the Jellicle Choice in Cats.) Wong's character helps out but can't select souls himself because he was never alive.

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nine-days

These new souls have instinctual knowledge, but not experience. The tests, which last nine days at maximum, involve a combination of tough questions, journaling and watching the video feeds from Earth. When a candidate fails the test, they are given the chance to experience one part of life they find truly moving in the form of intricately designed, surreally beautiful augmented reality experiences. One of the candidates, played by Zazie Beetz, grows particularly curious about her tester's experiences as a human, but this is a sore subject for him, and getting any answers is a challenge.

Nine Days is Edson Oda's first feature film, developed through the 2017 Sundance Screenwriter's Lab before premiering at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, and signals an outstanding directing talent to look out for. Its theological fiction plays kind of like a much more serious version of The Good Place, though it still has a sense of humor (Wong has particularly strong comedic delivery, as does Tony Hale as a soul seemingly pre-destined to fill a selfish sitcom dad stereotype). It's vision of an abstract existence before birth is strikingly original; it will be interesting to compare how Pixar's Soul deals with this type of setting in a presumably very different fashion. Its puzzles and big ideas are stimulating to the mind, and the cinematography and score please the eyes and ears.

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Most significantly, it moves the heart, particularly through Winston Duke's heavily layered performance. What Oda's done with Nine Days is something truly valuable: he's crafted a film that's completely empathetic to those struggling with suicidal depression that is also able to communicate the inherent value of living in a way that's not the least bit cornball or dismissive of life's worst hardships. The cogs in its cosmos are imperfect, and that's OK. This movie could genuinely save lives.

Nine Days stars Winston Duke, Zazie Beetz, Benedict Wong, Tony Hale, Bill Skarsgård and David Rysdahl. It will open the Austin Film Festival on October 22 and is scheduled to be released in theaters January 22, 2021.

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