‘Nine Days’ review: This moving, bittersweet fable is about souls waiting to be born, the audition of a lifetime

“Our Town,” Thornton Wilder’s gorgeous, rhapsodic bummer of a 1938 play, posed the big question: “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it — every, every minute?”

The filmmaker behind a most auspicious feature debut, “Nine Days,” is smart enough not to compete with “Our Town,” or the Michael Powell/Emeric Pressburger fantasy “A Matter of Life and Death,” or any other grandly ambitious exploration of what it means to be human, aware and awake to life’s possibilities.

Rather, the Japanese Brazilian writer-director Edson Oda has imagined something both small and tantalizing. His film operates as a drolly sustained and plaintively moving fable, in which unborn souls in human form go through a nine-day audition process, for a literal role of a lifetime.

Winston Duke (”Black Panther”) plays Will, the deceptively mild-mannered interrogator. He’s old-school: a note-taker who writes in longhand, and who favors suspenders and wire-rimmed glasses. He works out of a modest craftsman-style house incongruously plopped down in the middle of a desert. (Oda, based in Los Angeles, filmed “Nine Days” in Utah, California and Brazil.)

With oversight and commentary provided by his coworker Kyo (Benedict Wong, wonderfully expressive and low-keyed), Will spends his days reviewing the lives, already underway, of those souls he has chosen previously. His living room is dominated by a wall of 28 TV screens providing moment-by-moment progress, some joyous, some painful, of these souls-turned-humans.

Meantime a new crop begins a new nine-day audition. Among them is Emma, a bright, unfazed wonder portrayed by Zazie Beetz. She’s the glue in “Nine Days,” and the central trio of Duke, Beetz and Wong lends Oda’s film an unusually effective degree of natural, easy-breathing charisma. Others auditioning in the new round include Tony Hale as a loutish prospect plainly over his head, and Arianna Ortiz as a soul who’s sweet on Will but doesn’t quite know what to do with her proto-feelings.

For those not destined to make the cut, Will — a former theater actor, we learn, with a talent for inexpensive stagecraft — finds ways to reproduce a favorite moment from the short time they’ve spent, and the lives on the TV monitors they’ve witnessed. Will, a cryptic presence, is haunted by the fate of one of his previous selections, a concert violinist who possibly took her own life. What did he miss along the way? Could he have foreseen what was to come?

The movie proceeds in quiet, reflective tones, subtly energized by a fully realized visual environment and a clever variety of editing rhythms. “Nine Days” transcends the potential limitation and occasional strain of its premise. If you’ve seen the Anthony Minghella film “Truly, Madly, Deeply,” the mood and pacing may be familiar, though the two films travel in different metaphysical directions.

I like where this one goes, even if the ending (we’ll keep it vague) inadvertently sells Emma a bit short and reframes her role in “Nine Days” as protatgonist-saver. It’s a small drawback. Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics, Oda’s picture premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, just before everything changed. It is very, very difficult for a “specialty” film of real quality to find the audience it deserves, especially now. This is one of them.

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‘NINE DAYS’

3.5 stars (out of 4)

MPAA rating: R (for language and themes)

Running time: 2:04

Where to watch: In theaters Friday

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