REVIEWS
November 2019 | Sight&Sound | 63
Reviewed by Jonathan Romney
The new comedy from film and TV provocateur
Chris Morris (Four Lions, Brass Eye) is “based on
a hundred true stories”, an opening caption
announces. The satirical target is the US policy
of entrapment, tricking people suspected of
potential terrorist intent into committing crimes,
often using financial incentives. This allows the
authorities to imprison theoretically dangerous
figures before they commit real acts of violence
(as opposed to the phony acts they are persuaded
to commit under controlled conditions).
The topic is clearly one that invites satirical
treatment, as well as the serious consideration
it received in Kate Davis and David Heilbroner’s
2014 documentary The Newburgh Sting.
Morris and co-writer Jesse Armstrong approach
the topic with the mischief you might expect.
Armstrong’s CV as a television writer includes
Peep Show, The Thick of It and Veep (on which
Morris had a stint as director); he also co-wrote
Morris’s controversial (but ultimately less
confrontational than expected) 2010 feature
Four Lions, about an inept group of would-be
suicide bombers. That film confronted the taboo
comic theme of Islamic terrorism, cheerfully
defusing the topic as a focus of mainstream
paranoia (at the risk of suggesting that actual
extremist violence wasn’t something that
anyone needed to get too worried about).
Working with a not dissimilar theme, The Day
Shall Come virtually dares you to dismiss it as Four
Lions Made in USA. The film is about would-be
freedom fighters who are unwitting victims of
government manipulation: here, a radical group
led by a preacher, Moses, whose belief in the
overthrow of oppression is fuelled by ‘holy fool’
ingenuousness and a bizarre set of delusions.
Moses has forged a wildly eclectic belief system
that takes in elements of Islam, Rastafarianism,
Black Power militancy and an iconography
including Black Santa and 18th-century Haitian
revolutionary leader Toussaint L’Ouverture.
Inspired by Toussaint, he wears a tricorn, at one
point combined with silver robes reminiscent of
the space-pharaoh regalia of jazz maestro Sun Ra.
At heart an innocent and a pacifist, Moses
is encumbered by the script with an unwieldy
set of oddball convictions. He believes that
guns are a white weapon, and that therefore his
revolutionary army should stick to swords, slings
and (toy) crossbows. He claims that God has
spoken to him through a duck. And he believes,
seeing a crane struck by lightning, that he has
brought this about with his own God-granted
power. One could say that the tenderness the
film shows for its disturbed hero has something
in common with John Kennedy Toole’s novel
A Conspiracy of Dunces, with Moses as a black
counterpart to Toole’s blowhard outsider
Ignatius J. Reilly. Seen less charitably, however,
the depiction of Moses as a nexus of radical
delusions awkwardly recalls 1970s BBC comedy
Citizen Smith, which lampooned the British
‘loony left’ for a mainstream sitcom audience.
The film has much of the piquancy you
associate with Morris’s comedy, and ingenious
twistiness in portraying the paradoxes
arising from the logic of Homeland Security
manipulation: black militants making common
cause with white supremacists, the strategy of
staving off fears about a nuclear emergency by
declaring a nuclear emergency. There’s much
non-sequitur silliness too: cops and FBI arguing
over badge size, a rumour that Mexico plans
to send crocodiles across the US border. And
there’s ripe dialogue with the ring of Armstrong’s
vintage work on The Thick of It (an FBI operative
on things going badly: “This plays like a penny
whistle rammed up an orangutan’s butt”).
However, what partly makes the film less
incisive than Four Lions is the imbalance between
two different types of humour: the surreal, often
cartoonish farce around Moses, and the tart,
polished comedy of verbal fencing in the FBI
sections. Here, the casting feels too comfortable:
Denis O’Hare, as harried, cynical operation leader
Andy, and Anna Kendrick, uptight and snippy
as relatively sane Kendra, give performances
that are crisp and alert yet feel a little familiar,
their characters never coming alive like
the agitated politicos of Veep. The Day
The Day Shall Come
Director: Chris Morris
Certificate 15 87m 37s
Morris minor: Marchánt Davis
Upstate New York, present day. In an abandoned
hospital, a struggling actress named Mabel is working
on a low-budget horror film with a supporting cast of
circus performers. Mabel’s co-star Rosenthal suffers
from an extreme facial deformity. Despite Mabel’s
initial anxieties, the two strike up a friendship. On and
off set, the cast and crew spend time together, often
dancing into the night. As Mabel gets to know her co-
stars, her waking life and the drama of the film begin
to blur, prompting nightmares and strange visions.
After wrapping production, Mabel leaves the hospital
in a limo. Her driver tells her about his artistic
pursuits, changing her perspective once more.
Produced by
Vanessa McDonnell
Daniel Patrick
Carbone
Matthew Petock
Dan Schoenbrun
Zachary Shedd
Written by
Aaron Schimberg
Director of
Photography
Adam J. Minnick
Edited by
Sofi Marshall
Production Design
Sia Balabanova
Music
C. Spencer Yeh
Sound Mixer
Gillian Arthur
Costumes
Stacey Berman
Karen Boyer
©Chained for
Life LLC
Production
Companies
A Grand Motel,
The Eyslicer and
Flies Collective
production
A film by Aaron
Schimberg
With support
from Cinereach
Executive
Producers
Adam Regelmann
Nathan Slott
Jess Weixler
Cast
Jess Weixler
Mabel, ‘Freda’
Adam Pearson
Rosenthal
Charlie Korsmo
Herr Director
Sari Lennick
Sarah, ‘Olga’
Stephen Plunkett
Max
Joaquina
Kalukango
Michelle
Sammy Mena
Brutto
Frank Mosley
Frank
Eleanore Pienta
Molly
In Colour
[1.85:1]
Distributor
Anti-Worlds
Releasing
Credits and Synopsis
about moviemaking, it’s openly indebted to such
films as François Truffaut’s Day for Night (1973)
and Robert Altman’s The Player (1992), with the
latter casting a particularly long shadow over
Schimberg’s freely roaming camera (complete
with copious zooms courtesy of cinematographer
Adam J. Minnick) and use of overlapping
dialogue. As in Altman’s ensemble productions
or the early films of Noah Baumbach or Richard
Linklater, jokes are overheard or delivered in
passing by supporting characters carefully
positioned and captured in patient tracking
shots around the hospital grounds. Together,
these comedic, occasionally conspiratorial
tidbits contribute to the film’s offhand humour
and sense of casually unfolding intrigue, which
soon takes on a semi-hallucinatory vibe as
the narrative grows increasingly opaque.
It’s here where the film can become somewhat
exasperating, as the on- and off-set dramas begin
to blur to the point where each new scene seems
to reveal itself as either a rehearsal or a sequence
from the film-within-the-film – or in one case
a dream proposing a plot development that
Schimberg happily didn’t follow, if only because
where Mabel finds herself at film’s end is so
unexpectedly poignant. Leaving the hospital in a
limo after wrapping production, she’s regaled with
information by her Nigerian driver, an author
and aspiring filmmaker. Schimberg rhymes this
image, captured in a single shot with Weixler
facing the camera, with a shot of her co-stars
heading back by bus to their lives at the circus. The
juxtaposition is simple but striking, and speaks to
Schimberg’s quiet command of his material.
A RT
PRODUCTION
CLIENT
SUBS
REPRO OP
VERSION
Reviews, 6
