“I send flowers, and other people send pigs to eat them.”
I love this concept. What if every select few people had their own god who brings them into the world and watches over them, hoping for success, or who knows, maybe some gods are more sinister than others with which souls they choose to pave the world, as if all gods were competing for who could create the best lives. A god by the name of “Will” in this unique universe that first-timer Edson Oda has both written and directed seems to be constantly experimenting with which souls would better the existence of their own lives and not life all around, as if he were their guardian or parent. Will appears to represent your standard god here who begins contemplating if this competitive system of choosing a soul to live is broken and if nobody can truly know an individual through observation or conversation with them as he watches his previous chosen ones’ lives in retrospect and meets a soul self-named Emma who understands this discrepancy between say vs. do. In this case, Nine Days decently replicates the struggle of a god as a creator but also as a character who was once human. I say “decently” however because not only was the resolution to Will’s journey far too superfluous for my taste, but the drawback of this is to blame from the film as a whole having this unpleasant habit to sort of unimaginatively plot out the dramatic conflict he constantly faces with “eye-opening” uber-stereotypical personality types as if he were an amateur experiencing this job for only an eighth or ninth time, which should’ve been established instead to make this story seem more believable.
Nonetheless, I do at least appreciate the film’s disclosure that some gods would probably play it by a “survival rate” theory rather than a “moral rate” theory, precisely calculating the longevity of existing time an individual would likely have rather than on other factors for which may be worth considering. Strangely enough though, I think Nine Days successfully does what M. Night Shyamalan’s latest Old wanted to accomplish: to make us appreciate life a little more from showing a series of candidates fighting to have one in the first place by proving there worth through toughness and perseverance, something some of us don’t even think we have in the first place, yet, here we live.
Verdict: B-
“Nine Days” is now playing in select theaters.
Burning the Celluloid 
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