Nine Days

Imagine a job interview where the stakes aren't a 401k or a cubicle, but the right to exist. You’re sitting in a house in the middle of a vast, salt-flat purgatory, and your potential employer is a guy who looks like he’s been carrying the weight of the entire world on his shoulders for several centuries. That’s the high-concept hook of Nine Days, a film that somehow managed to be one of the most profound experiences of the early 2020s while almost nobody was looking.

I watched this film on my laptop during a rainy Tuesday while my neighbor was power-washing his driveway, and the rhythmic, distant drone weirdly synced up with Antonio Pinto’s cello-heavy score in a way that made my living room feel like it was drifting off into space. It’s that kind of movie—the kind that turns your immediate surroundings into a stage for something much bigger.

The Hardest Job Interview in the Universe

Winston Duke plays Will, a man whose job is to "select" souls for life on Earth. He lives in a house filled with file cabinets and old analog televisions that broadcast the lives of the people he’s already sent down. When a vacancy opens up—a "failure," as Will sees it—five new candidates arrive for a nine-day trial. They aren't babies; they are fully-formed personalities, blank slates ready to be imprinted with the burden of consciousness.

Duke is a revelation here. We’re used to him as the charismatic M'Baku in the MCU or the doting-but-doomed dad in Us, but here he is a fortress of a man. He’s grieving, though he wouldn't call it that. He’s a bureaucrat of the soul, and he plays the role with a crushing stillness that makes most Oscar-winning performances look like they’re trying too hard. He treats life like a precious, dangerous substance that most people are too fragile to handle.

Then there’s Zazie Beetz as Emma. If Will is the cold logic of survival, Emma is the inconvenient beauty of curiosity. While the other candidates—including a hilariously cynical Tony Hale and a heartbreakingly soft David Rysdahl—try to pass Will’s tests by proving they can be "tough" enough for the world, Emma just wants to know why the light hits the floor the way it does.

Analog Souls and VHS Memories

Director Edson Oda made this for $10 million, which is essentially the coffee budget for a Marvel movie, yet it feels more expansive than any multiverse. This is "lo-fi" sci-fi at its absolute peak. Instead of glowing holographic interfaces, Will uses VHS tapes and handwritten notes. When a candidate doesn’t make the cut, Will offers them a "gift": he uses mirrors, projectors, and handmade sets to recreate one moment they witnessed on the monitors—a bike ride, a walk on a beach, a snowfall—so they can experience it "for real" before they vanish.

It’s a beautiful metaphor for the art of filmmaking itself. It’s also a gutsy move in a contemporary landscape dominated by CGI spectacle. In an era where we’re constantly told that bigger is better, Nine Days argues that a piece of sheer fabric and a yellow lightbulb can evoke the feeling of a summer afternoon better than a $200 million rendering farm ever could.

The film feels like a cousin to Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life, but it’s firmly rooted in our current moment of collective burnout. It captures that 2021 feeling of looking at the world outside and wondering if it’s actually worth the effort of participation. The Academy owes Winston Duke a public apology for the 2022 nomination cycle, because the final five minutes of this film contain a monologue that should be taught in every acting class from now until the sun burns out.

Why You Haven't Heard of It

The tragedy of Nine Days is its box office. It made less than a million dollars. It was a victim of the "great theatrical squeeze" of the pandemic era—a quiet, contemplative indie released when theaters were still struggling and audiences were gravitating toward the safety of familiar franchises. It didn't have a cape or a legacy sequel hook, so it slipped through the cracks.

But obscurity suits this movie. Finding Nine Days feels like finding a dusty, unlabeled VHS tape in the back of a rental store that contains the meaning of life. It’s a movie about the tiny things—the taste of a peach, the feeling of sand between your toes—that make the inevitable pain of being human worth the price of admission. It doesn't provide easy answers, and it doesn't sugarcoat how hard the world can be.

It’s a drama that earns every single tear, mostly because it’s not interested in manipulating you. It’s just interested in whether or not you’re paying attention to the life you’ve already been granted.

This is the kind of cinema that reminds me why I love the medium. It's bold, deeply felt, and visually inventive without being flashy. If you've ever felt like the world was too much to handle, or if you’ve forgotten why we bother with all this mess in the first place, please find this film. It’s a quiet masterpiece that deserves a much louder following.