Seven Heads Are Better Than One

I don’t always want to be mean to NetflixOriginally started as a disc-by-mail service, Netflix has grown to be one of the largest media companies in the world (and one of the most valued internet companies as well). With a constant slate of new internet streaming-based programming that updates all the time, Netflix has redefined what it means to watch TV and films (as well as how to do it). movies. Occasionally, once in a very great while, some decent film gets released from the studio (although, admittedly, none come to mind right now), but Netflix has gained a reputation for cranking out slop. That actually is their mission, to make movies and shows that you can view while having a “second screen experience”. They expect you to be on your phone, or doing other things, while their movies play in the background, so they want films that are dumb enough you can keep up with the story even if your attention has faded for a few minutes here or there. Interesting, high-concept films do not normally work well under the Netflix model.

In fairness, What Happened to Monday wasn’t initially meant as a Netflix film. It was developed by SND Films, Vendôme Pictures, Raffaella Productions, Title Media, Nexus Factory, Umedia, and uFund (a collection of European studios working together, which actually isn’t all that uncommon), and Netflix only came in on the distribution side for North America. But when Netflix picks up a film for their service, you can almost guarantee it’ll have that Netflix “quality seal”. Just good enough to get your attention, but not good enough to keep it.

What Happened to Monday is one of the better Netflix films I’ve watched, in large part because lead actress Noomi Rapace (as all seven sisters in this film) is a fantastic actress who can command the screen. But the film itself is pretty dumb, despite its sci-fi futurist setting and high-concept ideas, and it fails to really develop the story or the world in any way that can make you truly care about what’s going on. It’s the kind of film that would have been really good if it were at least an hour longer (on its already decently long two-hour runtime) or, better yet, done as a miniseries. Instead it rushed, lurches, and gets to an ending it hasn’t really earned, leaving audiences unfulfilled.

In the future (2043, to be precise), human civilization has gotten too big. So big, in fact, that we’ve drained the natural resources. We’re on the brink of collapse, and the only way to fix it is to massively reduce the human population, which is why the European One Child Policy was introduced. Under it, families are only able to have one kid, total, with all other children being taken by the Child Allocation Bureau to be cryogenically frozen until such time as the world can support all these lives. And with people having more and more children, often in sets of two, three, four, or more, that’s a lot of kids getting frozen.

Terrence Settman (Willem Dafoe) has a daughter who gets pregnant and has seven identical daughters. She sadly dies in childbirth, but her daughters are all safe and alive, which is a problem because of that One Child Policy. So Terrence makes a new life for them, raising all seven girls in secret and then training them to share one life. Each girl is named for a day (Monday through Sunday), and on each day they get to go out and play their public life as Karen Settman. And this has worked for 30 years. But when Monday disappears on her day, the same day she was supposed to get a big promotion and upgrade the lives of all seven sisters, the other six ladies have to find out where their missing sister has gone, all while the CAB could very likely be closing in.

As a concept I like What Happened to Monday. Seven sisters being forced to share a single life, all of them carrying out this shared identity in public while living together in private, is a cool idea. With the right setup, backstory, and explanation this could actually work really well as a sci-fi dystopian thriller. Sadly, the actual meat and potatoes of What Happened to Monday lacks this substance, making the film far dumber than it should be.

Terrence has these seven girls, and he’s somehow able to raise all of them in secret, in a single apartment, in a crowded city, in an apartment building where he rents. That alone already strains belief because, for starters, how could he take care of seven screaming babies without anyone knowing. How could he stop neighbors from figuring out what was going on when there were seven pairs of little steps running around, seven sets of voices (even if they were all the same) talking. Someone should have figured things out long before the 30 year mark where we catch up with the sisters. It doesn’t really make sense.

You have to just accept that to even be able to buy into the main story, wherein these seven different ladies who, in private all act very differently, can somehow share a single life and all play the same performance perfectly. These aren’t seven girls raised to be the same. Wednesday and Friday are more warrior types, while Thursday is a bookish shut-in who hates going outdoors. Tuesday is a free spirit, Saturday is more artsy and weird. These are all personalities conveyed mostly by Rapace’s performance, as the movie itself doesn’t invest at all in these ladies, but it’s still just enough for you to say, “I don’t think these ladies could pull this off for even a few days, let alone thirty years.” It doesn’t work.

The film wants you to buy into these women the same way we could buy into the varied and different performances of Tatiana Maslany on Orphan Black. While I think Rapace is an actress more than capable of pulling off that kind of performance, imbuing each woman with their own personality and mannerisms, the film doesn’t give us the kind of time to really get into the woman or think of them as individuals. Hell, I’m not even sure I got all their names right as they are, for the most part, fleetingly different, all bunching together in my mind as one mass of the same character. Monday is the only one that stands out for me, and that’s simply because she’s missing for most of the film.

But if you can at least buy into all this then there’s a moderately interesting, if not entirely well designed, thriller lurking in the plot. Monday goes missing, so the next day Tuesday goes out to find out what happened. When Tuesday then goes missing the other girls really start to freak out, and the chase is on. There are some decent action sequences and a few fun moments, but the film never really manages to build up its story the way it needs to, in much the same way that it really fails to develop its characters. Most of the twists of the film are thoroughly expected and not that interesting, with only one twist right at the end making me go, “oh, okay, that explains some stuff…” But it’s not enough to really redeem the film.

I really think a story like this needs far more time to develop. I could see a version as a miniseries where the first three episodes go from Tuesday through Saturday, each lady getting twenty minutes of screen time as Karen in the real world while we see what the other sisters do at home to support them, all while backstory is teased out between key plot moments. Then in the fourth episode, with Monday, we get the start of her day before she vanishes, and the back half of the series pivots into a quest for the other girls to find their sister. You need that kind of time just to view the sisters as different people, as well as to flesh out the world so it feels like a real place and not just a few small sets and set pieces that string the story along.

What Happened to Monday is a solid idea grafted onto a far less interesting movie. It’s not the fault of Rapace, as she does everything she can with the material, but this script clearly had to feel more interesting on paper than on the screen. I can see why Rapace was drawn to it, and I won’t deny it was at least watchable in the moment. But as soon as the film was over I couldn’t help but tear it apart. It’s not strong enough to stand on its own.