Nine Days

Winner of the Best Screenplay award at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, Edson Oda’s directorial debut is a brilliantly constructed fantasy drama with an intriguing premise: what if souls had to audition to be born into our world? In a solitary house in a desert, Winston Duke incarnates the role of Will, a serious individual tasked with determining—over the titular nine days—which of five souls, if any, are worthy of making their way to earth as a human being. There are difficult challenges to be met, questions to be answered, labours to be fulfilled, as, one by one, they must prove themselves. Soon, the irrepressible Emma (Zazie Beetz) comes to the fore…

‘At the risk of overselling Edson Oda’s ultra-original, meaning-of-life directorial debut, there’s a big difference between “Nine Days” and pretty much every other film ever made. You see, most movies are about characters, real or imagined, and the stuff that happens to them, whereas “Nine Days” is about character itself—as in, the moral dimension that constitutes who a person is, how he or she treats others, and the choices that define us as humans.’—Peter Debruge, Variety