NINE DAYS (2021) |The Masterpiece Nobody Saw (High)

We went High on Nine Days, but this is a very different kind of High for us. This is not a massive cultural touchstone, a blockbuster, or one of those movies everyone already agrees is a classic. Nine Days (2021) is a small, quiet, underseen film with an enormous idea: what if, before you were born, you had to interview for the chance to live? That premise could have turned into something overly abstract or painfully sentimental, but Edson Oda’s Nine Days does something much more powerful. It uses tube TVs, VHS tapes, one isolated house, and a vast salt flat to ask one of the biggest questions a movie can ask: what makes life worth living? And instead of answering with speeches about destiny or meaning, it answers through small human moments: a peach, a bike ride, a joke at dinner, a scream from the top of a mountain, someone seeing you clearly before you disappear. In this episode, we talk about Nine Days, written and directed by Edson Oda, as one of the best movies almost nobody talks about. The film stars Winston Duke as Will, Zazie Beetz as Emma, Benedict Wong as Kyo, Bill Skarsgård as Kane, Tony Hale as Alexander, Arianna Ortiz as Maria, and David Rysdahl as Mike. It is a high-concept drama with an indie-scale approach, and that combination is exactly why it works. The setup is simple and devastating. Will lives in an isolated house surrounded by salt flats, watching human lives unfold through old television screens. When one of those lives ends, several unborn souls arrive at his door and compete for the chance to be born. Over nine days, Will interviews them, tests them, studies them, and decides which one gets to enter the world. But the longer the process goes on, the more the movie shifts away from the question of who deserves life and toward the question of whether Will can remember why life mattered to him in the first place. We spend a lot of time talking about how original this premise feels, especially now. This is the kind of small, high-concept adult drama that used to have more room in the movie landscape. Today, it feels like films either get made for very little or get inflated into giant franchise products, with almost nothing in the middle. Nine Days feels like it belongs to that missing middle: thoughtful, emotional, strange, ambitious, and built for adults who want a movie to sit with them after it ends. One of the biggest Highs is the movie’s minimalism. It could have buried itself in explanations about heaven, purgatory, angels, souls, or the mechanics of the afterlife. Instead, it keeps the world grounded and almost mundane. Will and Kyo have a job. There are groceries. There are reports. There are tapes. There are TVs stacked in a little house. That normalcy makes the otherworldly elements feel more haunting, not less. The movie does not need glowing portals or enormous visual effects. Its mystery works because it stays intimate. We also talk about the POV footage on the televisions. The idea that Will watches lives from the inside, through each person’s direct experience, is beautiful and immersive. It makes life feel both ordinary and miraculous. The movie finds meaning in the images that pass by quietly in the background, which is really the whole point. Most of life is not the big defining event. Most of life is the stuff we barely notice while it is happening. The performances are another huge High. Winston Duke has to play Will as buttoned-up, clinical, wounded, and deeply compassionate all at once. He is detached because he has to be, but we can feel how much the work is destroying him. Every time he recreates a final wish for one of the souls who is not selected, the movie becomes almost unbearably tender. He is there to comfort them before they disappear, and then he breaks when they are gone. Zazie Beetz as Emma is the soul of the movie. Emma represents the thing Will has forgotten: curiosity, presence, openness, and awe. She shows up late because she is probably looking at the sky, the ground, the light, the air, and everything around her. She does not play the interview game the way Will wants her to. She asks questions. She notices things. She eats a peach not because she is hungry, but because she can. That is the whole movie right there. The central debate of the episode is whether Will makes the right choice. He chooses Kane because he believes Kane is better equipped to survive the harshness of the world. Will sees Emma’s openness as a kind of vulnerability, maybe even a fatal one. He is not trying to be cruel. He is trying to protect the world from swallowing another person like him. But that is what makes the choice so heartbreaking. Emma may not be armored, but she might be exactly what the world needs more of. She refuses to argue why someone else should not live. She refuses to turn existence into a competition built on tearing another person down. To Will, that means she is not ready. To us, it might mean she understands life better than anyone else in the room. We also talk about the ending, which is perfect. Emma’s final request is not for Will to create a fantasy for her. It is for him to perform the monologue from the one moment in his own life when he felt seen. When he recites Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” across the salt flats, the movie reveals that Emma’s gift to him is remembrance. She reminds him of the joy he once had, the art he once loved, and the life he has spent years reducing to a job. Our one Low is small but worth discussing. Late in the movie, another interviewer arrives with information that confirms Amanda’s death was suicide. We understand why the movie does it, because it gives Will a clear trigger for his spiral, but part of us thinks the uncertainty might have been stronger. Not knowing would have left Will trapped in the same painful space the audience is in: trying to make peace with something that cannot be fully explained. Still, Nine Days is a High because it is generous in a way very few movies are. It deals with grief, suicide, loneliness, and the terror of not getting the life you hoped for, but it is not really a movie about death. It is a movie about why life matters. It asks us to sit with pain, then gives us gratitude. Nine Days 2021 review Edson Oda’s Nine Days Winston Duke as Will Zazie Beetz as Emma Benedict Wong as Kyo Bill Skarsgård as Kane Tony Hale as Alexander Nine Days movie ending explained Nine Days as an underseen indie film Auditioning for life in Nine Days Tube TVs and VHS tapes in Nine Days Salt flats cinematography Nine Days and the meaning of life Emma’s final request Walt Whitman Song of Myself scene Will and Amanda’s death Grief and suicide in Nine Days Why life is worth living Small moments in Nine Days Nine Days as a high-concept adult drama