We’ve talked about Chris Morris before with his cult dark comedy piece Four Lions—which he followed up in 2019 with The Day Shall Come, which slipped under the radar and hasn’t really been talked about as much since. Was this something deserved, or should the day indeed come for The Day Shall Come?
Appropriately enough, the film is set in what’s already a deranged realm of lunatics indulging their orgies of insanity in such manners that they twist into the most absurd and bleakest realms of laughter—Florida. And as such, we have Marchánt Davis as Moses Al-Shabazz, leading a tiny commune-cult that’s in the vein of all manner of weird one-off outfits that tended to form syncretic theologies between pre-existing religions, UFO documentaries, and VHS copies of David Lynch’s Dune as viewed on bootleg prozac.
Anyhoo, Moses here seems kooky but ultimately harmless, humored by his wife (Danielle Brooks) and for all his talk of revolution mostly seems bent on trying to pay the rent. Eventually, he catches the eye of FBI operatives Anna Kendrick and Dennis O’Hare, desperate to make big arrests in the name of office and state politics, who try to catch themselves a ‘terrorist’ via sting operations…unfortunately for them, Moses is is off-kilter enough that it doesn’t quite go that simply.
There’s inspiration here from the Liberty City Seven cases and other such bizarre incidents stemming from the eternal paranoia of something founded by J. Edgar Hoover—but whereas Four Lions got right into the meat of something all too public like jihadi terrorism, this one’s a big more specific. You might get some chuckles if you know about your certain weird cults as I did, but there’s things here likely to just fly over the heads of some people—and whereas Morris’ prior film leaned into the dark wackiness with its appropriate over the top characters, here it just feels a little more subdued than it needs to be.
That’s not to say there’s not some highlights—like when our leads try to jury-rig fake nuclear bombs with beans, and, erm, bodily fluids (it just about makes sense in context!). And, since the film’s release, when US policing and demented paranoia to anything stepping beyond ever stricter lines in the powers that be is even more front and center, well, it does feel like the film could’ve been better suited if it had come out a few years later with perhaps just a few more changes in the script.
Comments
Post a Comment