124 min | R | July 30, 2021 | Sony Pictures Classics
An unborn soul interviews for the right to be born. A grim bureaucrat of the afterlife runs the test, grading candidates on how well they would survive a life they have never lived. The premise is audacious and the film almost gets all the way there.
A soul waits in a house at the edge of nowhere to decide who gets to be born. Will sits in that house and conducts interviews. The candidates are unborn souls competing for a single human life. They answer his questions, watch footage of real lives on old televisions, and hope he picks them. Edson Oda builds a metaphysical procedure out of this premise and asks a blunt question underneath it. What makes a life worth granting to someone who has never lived one.
Winston Duke plays Will as a former human turned bureaucrat of existence. He grades his candidates on stoicism and resilience and treats joy as a liability. Duke holds his face shut for most of the film and lets the cracks show only when the system fails him. Zazie Beetz plays Emma as a candidate who refuses the test entirely. She answers his questions with questions and keeps choosing wonder over the survival logic Will rewards. Benedict Wong plays Kyo, Will’s only companion, with a warmth that exposes how much Will has buried.
Oda writes and directs his first feature with a control that suits the material. He shoots the house in flat domestic light and saves visual scale for the recorded lives playing on the bank of TVs. The candidates’ point of view comes through analog footage, grainy and handheld, which makes the secondhand experience of living feel both intimate and out of reach. The production design keeps the afterlife mundane. A clapboard house, a VHS rig, a desk. That ordinariness is the point. Oda stages eternity as paperwork.
The film commits hard to its conceit and earns its biggest moment when Will stages a parting gift for a candidate he cannot choose. The closing stretch lands because Duke has spent the whole film withholding. The metaphysics turn schematic in places, and Oda sometimes explains what the images already say. The reach exceeds the grip. But a debut that reaches this far and means every word of it is worth sitting with.