Sundance review: 'Nine Days' is a heartbreakingly beautiful movie about the pluses and minuses of being human

Nine Days’

★★★★

Playing in the U.S. Dramatic competition of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 124 minutes.

Screens again: Tuesday, Jan. 28, 9 a.m., The Ray (Park City); Wednesday, Jan. 29, 3 p.m., Resort (Sundance); Thursday, Jan. 30, 8:30 p.m., Prospector (Park City); Friday, Jan. 31, 6 p.m., The Grand (Salt Lake City); Saturday, Feb. 1, noon, PC Library (Park City).

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Bold in its vision and heartbreaking in its humanity, writer-director Edson Oda’s “Nine Days” is a brilliant, beautiful story that asks the simplest and hardest question there is: What does it mean to be human?

In a house in the middle of a severe alternate reality — OK, really, in the middle of Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats — a man named Will (played by Winston Duke) spends his days watching a wall of dozens of TV screens, each of them showing the point-of-view of someone living on Earth. Will dutifully keeps journals and tapes of what’s on these screens, and puts them a file cabinet.

On these screens, Will and his friend Kyo (Benedict Wong) watch entire lives play out — including a bride-to-be, a man in a wheelchair, and a high school kid being bullied. Will’s favorite screen shows Amanda, a violin virtuoso about to perform in an important concert. Then Amanda dies in a car crash, possibly a suicide, and Will is at a loss for explaining why someone with such promise could be dead.

Will has a more pressing problem: He has a screen to fill. So he brings in a handful of souls, for want of a better word, who are applying for the opportunity to be born as a human being. These souls come to the house to start a 9-day selection process.

The applicants are an eclectic bunch, including a happy-go-lucky party type (Tony Hale), a sensitive artist (David Rysdahl), and a ruthless pragmatist (Bill Skarsgard). But Will becomes most intrigued by a late arrival, whom he dubs Emma (Zazie Beetz), who takes an optimistic and artistic approach to being a potential human — the same traits that made Amanda a perfect choice and may have doomed her, and possibly the ones Will possessed in his years-ago stint as a human.

Oda has created an endlessly inventive movie, one that embeds the great philosophical question about what a human being is into a wealth of thoughtful visual signals. He claims Hirokazu Kore-Eta’s “After Life,” Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” and Wim Wenders’ “Wings of Desire” as influences, and they’re definitely all here. And, heeding the rule that the greatest filmmakers steal from the best, there are shots that mimic classic images from “Lawrence of Arabia” and “The Searchers.”

The ensemble cast is endlessly sharp, with Hale’s comic performance lightening what could be a somber tone. But it’s Beetz and Duke who shine brightest in “Nine Days,” as they engage in a running tete-a-tete about the answers Will expects and the ones she’s willing to give. From bleak beginning to triumphant end, “Nine Days” is an artful and tender examination of humanity’s worst fears and highest aspirations.