Bringing earnest literary grandstanding to more or less the same plot as Pixar’s Soul, this is an awkward but still striking debut picture
Although arguably a smidge too ponderous and self-serious for its own good, Nine Days still represents a reasonably promising debut for its writer-director Edson Oda. This Brazilian-Japanese film-maker, who comes out of the world of advertising and developed this through the Sundance Lab (not always a great sign to be honest) has crafted a visually striking work that blends metaphysics, moral philosophy and melodrama into a potent movie cocktail. The result is flavoursome and distinctive, but probably didn’t need the paper umbrella of grad-school literary grandstanding, a maraschino cherry garnish of sentimentality, and dash-of-absinthe cray-cray.
It was probably sheer accident in terms of core plot device set-up, but Nine Days (which premiered at the Sundance film festival in January 2020), is very similar to Pixar animated feature Soul, which came out at the end of the same year. Like Soul, Nine Days concerns itself with unborn entities, all of whom are hoping to find passage into the world of the living. They will never remember their time in this strange-looking clapboard house filled with TV sets and shabby filing cabinets, a manse eerily sited in the middle of a desert expanse (actually, the Great Salt Lake).