What Happened to Monday (2017)

August 31, 2017 1:53 PM

In a world where families are limited to one child due to overpopulation, a set of identical septuplets must avoid being put to a long sleep by the government and dangerous infighting while investigating the disappearance of one of their own.
posted by guiseroom (8 comments total)

I watched and really enjoyed this! The only thing that sucked is I think it would have made way more sense if Monday was actually just terrible, rather than having a Reason That Could Be Understood.

Also, were both her babies going to be protected even if her sibs were gone? It just doesn't make sense.
posted by corb at 2:08 PM on August 31, 2017 [2 favorites]

I assumed protecting her babies was part of Monday's agreement with Glenn Close's character.

I love Noomi Rapace and I love clone anything, but man. This movie just ended up bumming me out so much. That was a lot of violent death in a couple of hours.

I was also displeased with the deployment of the Doomed Virgin trope for Saturday, and with the fact that Thursday was so clearly queer-coded, but they tapdanced around and away from any firm declaration of it.
posted by angeline at 8:27 PM on August 31, 2017 [1 favorite]

galaxy brain: pro-life Snowpiercer
posted by fleacircus at 10:51 PM on August 31, 2017 [4 favorites]

Given the subject matter, I expected a movie similar to Gattaca or Children of Men, but it's much more action-driven with lots of fights and gore (the director is known for the Nazi zombie Dead Snow movies and for Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, so that was in fact expected). The scenes with the sisters as kids are very good, and more time could have been spent on the daily life of the adult sisters: since they're quite different in temperament, how did they manage to behave credibly as the dedicated, high-performance executive Karen? And how did their dad manage to care for 7 babies in secret, all by himself? I would have loved to see Willem Dafoe juggling with diapers and baby bottles.

That said, the movie is entertaining and original. It subverts the concept of plot armor in an interesting (though violent) way, and the ending is both positive and bleak. The Romanian setting was new for a Sci-Fi movie (if you're not Romanian of course). After The Girl with all the gifts (another sci-fi movie with a majority-female cast, btw), it looks that Glenn Close has cornered the Scientist-With-Good-Intentions-But-Horrible-Ethics market. Noomi Rapace was good, perhaps not very subtle but I guess that it was challenging to play 7 different characters in a subtle way. Note: in the final fight, pay attention to the earrings, they make all the difference!
posted by elgilito at 10:08 AM on September 1, 2017 [2 favorites]

Very much a curate's egg of a movie. On the one hand, its sheer oddness is something I'd like to see a lot more of, and whereas I'm not sure I'd like to see more of the brutality (I'm thinking the amputations and the cremator particularly), it set it apart from the mainstream product that it was, really, in its heart of hearts. I agree that there were several much more interesting films lurking in there - mostly to do with the sisters' home life - that I'd rather have liked to see.

What did strike me is that it seemed as though there were a couple of editorial passes that were missed, things to do with characterisation and plot that could have been sorted out, but I suppose they just added to the oddness, which (as I've mentioned) I quite like.

The ending was very curious, as though the one they had originally didn't pass muster, or they forgot to do one altogether and had to cobble something together - the combination of the "new eye", the babies in the tank and Adrian seamlessly transferring his affections to the surviving sister who wasn't actually gay was a bit convenient.
posted by Grangousier at 10:43 AM on September 1, 2017 [6 favorites]

Yeah, I think that's the other reason I was really frustrated that the sisters kept dying - I mean, it contributes to the 'why each sister, in turn, needs to take her chance' plot gimmick, but I wanted to see more of each of their interactions, more of each of their backstory, how it all played out with their differences.
posted by corb at 11:04 AM on September 1, 2017 [4 favorites]

This was fun, and I do enjoy both Rapace's acting and Wirkola's kinetic brand of direction. But it did feel like maybe the screenwriter had serious ideas in mind and then either lost the track or was rewritten by Wirkola to focus more on fight scenes and 'splosions. I'd consider it a mild disapppointment, but still an okay use of two idle hours.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 10:31 AM on September 3, 2017

Interestingly, it was on the 2010 Black List, alongside Argo, Looper, Chronicle and a number of other now-released movies. Originally, the Settmans were male, but Wirkola thought it would be more interesting to change that - which probably impacted the ending for purely biological/logistical reasons. In the list, the title has a question mark at the end.
posted by Grangousier at 4:01 PM on September 3, 2017