It’s heavy, heady stuff, coming at you via a delivery system of catalog-worthy set design, magic-hour cinematography, and often tamped-down, deadpan performances. Not to mention the fact that Will is one of the few in this vaguely pastoral purgatory to have actually been on Earth, an experience that still weighs on him. The latter, in particular, keeps lobbing queries back at the interviewer, forcing him to engage in a way he’d usually rather not. Having been shaken by seeing a former case study die in a car crash, Will has begun questioning the nature of his endeavor as he and his assistant (Benedict Wong) run through a new batch of candidates, some of whom are played by Tony Hale (funny), Bill Skarsgård (freaky), and Zazie Beetz (fabulous). Last-wish requests turn into arts-and-crafts projects involving fake beach scenes, movie screens, stationary cycles, jaunty music, teary cheeks. Before a life begins, it’s represented by color bars and a test-pattern whistle.
(He’s played by Us/ Black Panther star Winston Duke, who proves he’s as adept at art-house minimalism as he is at horror/Marvel movie maximalism.) His headquarters is a throwback Craftsman house in the middle of a literal nowhere, and he watches his former picks go about their lives via vintage home-entertainment equipment and videotapes. Will, the stoic gent who’s one of this limbo’s selectors, dresses like an uptight Amish metaphysics professor. This is the premise of Nine Days, Edson Oda’s odd, affecting portrait of a prelife purgatory A cross between a Gondry-esque chin-stroker and a Zen Buddhist tweak on The Good Place, Nine Days - so named for the length it takes to choose a candidate for birth - has its share of near-twee tics. If not, perhaps the man will do what he can to give us one fleeting moment of happiness before we disappear into the ether. If we are lucky, we are chosen to go forth, from cradle to grave. And when he’s not doing that, he’s reviewing former “vacancies” that he’s filled, watching on a bank of monitors displaying numerous lives in progress. Small granny spectacles perch on his nose as he asks questions of those who sit before him. The interrogator is tall, quiet, fastidious, well-dressed. Before we can get on that particular merry-go-round, however, we must first be interviewed.
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