Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B-

Depending on your level of patience for slow pacing, you might think the new film Nine Days feels like it lasts about that long.

This movie has a lot in it that’s ripe for discussion, but I do think how slow it is will be a challenge for most. It was reportedly a “Sundance Festival Favorite” last year, but let’s face it, few movies that qualify for such a distinction translate into widespread success outside the film festival context. This is that kind of movie. I can see it easily debated among academics, but calling that a great compliment is dubious at best.

Admittedly, Nine Days feels very thematically dense, and yet its themes largely flew over my head. That doesn’t mean I didn’t like it. I just found myself sometimes wondering what the point was. This is a film about “candidates” getting interviewed over the course of—you guesses it!—nine days to see which one of them gets to be born and live a rich life. I’m not sure it’s supposed to be reincarnation, per se; like many of its ideas, Nine Days lacks clarification there.

Only two of the characters are known for sure to have ever been alive before, including our protagonist, the interviewer, named Will (Winston Duke). When we are introduced to Will at the beginning of the film. he is spending a lot of time watching people on a wall full of old TV monitors, taking notes. It takes several minutes for us to piece together that he is watching the lives of his previous “selections.” He is particularly focused on one named Amanda, whose point of view is quite literally the opening shots of the film.

There’s a lot that writer-director Edson Oda does with the filmmaking here that could easily have fallen on its face, and yet works surprisingly well. Those TV monitors, each representing someone’s life living on Earth, is a point-of-view shot, as though we are looking out through their eyes from inside their head. One has to wonder how much of that footage was shot, because it is impressively assembled, and succeeds in its intended effect.

There’s never any explanation of exactly where it is that all these people are, although it’s clearly not the dimension we live in. Early on, a character asks if they are dead, and Will clarifies that it’s best not to think of it as dead or alive. What is it, then? I suppose this world, in an isolated house on a beach, is in some sense a kind of purgatory. Who is Will working for? There’s a guy named Kyo (Benedict Wong) who seems to serve as some level of overseer, although he functions really just as a companion, who usually just hangs out and is sometimes argumentative. We are meant to understand Kyo is someone who has never been alive.

Besides Wong, and Tony Hale as one of the “candidates,” the ensemble cast consists of mostly unrecognizable faces, which serves the story well. My struggle with that story is that I can’t quite figure out what it’s trying to say, unless I want to take it very literally and come away with a somewhat incongruous late sequence that’s all about not taking life’s precious moments for granted. Honestly, a lot of Nine Days feels like far more effort than necessary for the story being told. Why does the framing device have to be so complicated?

And yet, there is something uniquely soothing about its tone. I’m also impressed by its exclusively practical production. There are no special effects to speak of, aside from when candidates occasionally dissipate. Otherwise, it’s all done on set, including elaborate setups that Will constructs like a carpenter, to create “a moment” that candidates liked from all that TV monitor footage.

It must be said, also, that every single performance in this film is terrific. There’s a peculiar moment early on when Will tells one of the candidates that they are in a place where emotions are not felt as “deeply” as they get felt when one is alive. And yet, the characters themselves prove over time to be brimming with emotion, especially when faced with rejection, as only one of them will be selected for life. Oda does a good job of drawing multdimensional, nuanced and distinct personalities among then all, especially Emma (Zazie Beets), a wide-eyed innocent who confounds Will with her almost defiantly evasive answers to his questions.

His questions are very specific. Will presents candidates with scenarios and then asks them what they would do in that situation. The responses are both varied and plausible. Once the candidates are whittled down to two, one of them you see coming a mile away and the other is a bit more of a surprise. Nine Days does get a lot more compelling as it goes along, but it takes its sweet time getting there, as Will spends his days making old-school VCR recordings of moments in his previous selections’ lives, on actual videocassettes. I could never quite decide what to make of these peculiar design choices, with Will working with real-world technological tools but exclusively ones that are long outdated.

Such is the case with much of Nine Days: I don’t quite know what to make of it. Except that the acting is excellent. And maybe someone smarter than me could watch it and help me get a handle on precisely what it’s trying to say. Will goes through a distinct emotional arc of his own, second guessing himself after a tragic turn in Amanda’s life, and eventually has something akin to an emotional breakdown of his own, after being quite pointedly deadpan for a very long time. There are occasionally sudden bursts of emotion in this movie, but most of the time it moves on a very even keel, which if nothing else I have to admit, I found oddly comforting.

*If you’re looking for meaning . . . maybe it’s here, maybe it isn’t.*

Overall: B