But while the attempts are admirable, what of the results? What are the filmmakers’ intentions? Is it to nail the exact process whereby, as in the case of “Soul,” souls are selected to incarnate as humans on earth? To provide food for thought? It would have to be the latter, right? Because who really knows how this stuff works?
Soul Similarities
“Nine Days” resembles “Soul” more than a little, except this is not the story of a jazz musician who falls through cracks between dimensions and realities and, trying to find his way back to earthly existence, stumbles into the (highly contrived) cartoon version of the sorting process whereby souls get reborn.“Nine Days” similarly contains the notion that a soul must have specific qualifications in order to be granted the opportunity for birth. “Soul” was superior in that its contrived birth-selection process served as a framework to tell a fun story, whereas “Nine Days” appears to be attempting to lay claim to an actual metaphysical process. Albeit by using artifices such as a guy (Winston Duke, unrecognizable from his role as the bombastic M’Baku in “Black Panther”) in a clapboard house in the middle of the desert sitting all day looking at a bank of 1980s TVs and VCRs, and watching VHS videos nonstop to see who’s got the incarnation goods.
Will, Selector of Souls
So this guy Will is occasionally visited by a friend named Kyo (Benedict Wong), but mostly he’s monk-like. Will’s in there all day screening candidates for earthly existence. Apparently he’s not even particularly qualified; he got the job by merely having incarnated once. As opposed to Kyo who’s never incarnated.
Will also watches tapes of the lives of souls he green-lit for life. One of his favorites, a successful concert violinist named Amanda, commits suicide. This rocks Will’s world. Of course, what Will’s world actually is, is what we’re trying to figure out here. But, you know—why in this strange, fairly emotionless in-between place, is he freaking out? Anyway, in addition to rocking Will’s otherworldly world and getting him to start contemplating the meaning of life, why Amanda killed herself, and how he missed the clues—he now, amidst his devastation, has to pick a replacement for her.
See, right there, that’s like five million assumptions and permutations-combinations of contrived explanations of esoteric goings-on which necessitate contrived logical outcomes, all of which are kind of mind-bogglingly random.
But anyway, there are five candidates: Alex (Tony Hale), a nervous fellow who prefers to stick his head in the sand regarding life’s inconveniences and would rather just chill and have a beer with Will; Maria (Arianna Ortiz), a mild-mannered woman who warms to Will; Kane (Bill Skarsgard, the terrifying clown Pennywise from “It”) who’s got traditional manly approaches to the morally challenging hypothetical situations Will demands they all respond to; Mike (David Rysdahl), a sensitive artistic type; and Emma (Zazie Beetz), who manages to side-step all attempts to categorize her.
But before they disappear forever, Will has them write down a life experience they would have most liked to have lived, and he will do his best to kindly recreate it for them, via methods similar to how, in the early days of cinema, the sound effects for someone walking on a beach was a guy stomping around in a sandbox with some other guys pointing microphones at his feet.
B+ for Effort
“Nine Days” will have you thinking about the meaning of life, certainly, but also, similar to Thornton Wilder’s classic play “Our Town,” considering the tragedy of not living each moment to its fullest. It further questions whether human beings are inherently good or bad.As to the current spate of movies attempting to explain human existence and how it all goes down, I’m of the opinion that anyone, provided they put in a metric ton of reading spread over decades, will find there’s a blueprint that emerges. Exactly like the work of Joseph Campbell, who searched across a wide spectrum of human recorded knowledge from vastly differing cultures. He found that archetypes hove into sight. The exact same cultural myths and legends appear in New Guinea, Siberia, the Congo, the Amazon rain-forest, Great Britain, and anywhere on earth—and are told in exactly the same way.
In other words, all the great mystics, druids, shamans, seers, gurus, clairvoyants, lamas, sages, saints, prophets, and wise men who claimed to see things with spiritual vision, they might hail from New Guinea, Siberia, the Congo, the Amazon rain-forest, or Great Britain ... but they’re all describing exactly the same things. And so from that blueprint we can get a sense of what happens in the after-life and pre-life and “see” what those processes will look like, even though (like the missing puzzle pieces) we can’t yet personally see them with these human flesh sensory organs.