Nine Days is slow going at first—it sometimes feels as if the title is a reference to its running time—but eventually this pensive, existential thought experiment blossoms into something more cinematic. The premise: an “interviewer” named Will (Winston Duke) welcomes a handful of slightly confused strangers to his isolated home, where he spends nine days asking them questions and posing what-if, philosophical scenarios. (Zazie Beetz, Tony Hale, and Bill Skarsgard are among the subjects.) At the end of the time, Will selects one of them to be born as a human. Writer-director Edson Oda, making his feature debut, devises a number of ways to make this visually interesting, including a wall of retro television sets that display the ongoing lives of previous souls Will has selected. This helps to counter the didacticism of some of the “what makes life worth living” conversations. (For a more delicate exploration of that question, see Pixar’s Soul or Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life). Like Soul, Nine Days also builds toward a moving epiphany for its central character, one that here also functions as a powerhouse piece of performance by Duke. I won’t spoil the details, but will suggest brushing up on your Walt Whitman to fully appreciate the moment.
