The king of absurdist satire follows up Four Lions with a tragicomic tale of the Feds setting up a deluded preacher as kingpin of a fake terror plan
Billed as being “based on a hundred true stories”, this dark tragicomedy from co-writer/director Chris Morris paints a cracked portrait of counter-terrorism operations in the
United States in which imagined enemies are eminently more imprisonable than their real-life counterparts. While The Day Shall Come may lack the breathtaking bite of Morris’s feature debut Four Lions or the experimental weirdness of his head-spinning TV show Jam, it does boast a fine cast, an alarming premise and a palpable sense of anger behind its increasingly absurdist comedy.
Marchánt Davis is Moses, “sultan” of the “Star of Six community farm and mission” in Miami, which preaches salvation through a heady cocktail of education, mysticism and martial arts, inspired by the figure of Haitian rebel Toussaint Louverture. With his wife, Venus (Danielle Brooks), Moses is preparing for “the great inversion” – the revolution that will change the world. Crucially, this revolution will be achieved “without the gun weapon”, since Moses believes only in “weapons of tradition”, which appear to include a toy crossbow, imaginary ray guns and his own ability to bring down gentrifying cranes with his mind.