365 Days: This Day, 2022.
Directed by Barbara Białowąs and Tomasz Mandes.
Starring Anna-Maria Sieklucka, Magdalena Lamparska, and Michele Morrone.
SYNOPSIS:
Laura and Massimo are back and stronger than ever. But Massimo’s family ties and a mysterious man bidding for Laura’s heart complicate the lovers’ lives.
While the big-screen future for numerous film genres seems worryingly dim, there’s one type of movie that, perhaps more than any other, feels better suited for at-home streaming audiences; the erotic thriller.
Though the depressingly tame Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy took over $1.3 billion dollars worldwide, it’s difficult to imagine any similarly-intentioned enterprise replicating that level of success post-pandemic. Simply put, aren’t these movies better engineered for audiences who are seconds away from their bedrooms and can immediately re-watch the best bits, in 4K no less?
As such it’s little surprise that 2020’s 365 Days, an adaptation of the first entry in Blanka Lipińska’s erotic novel trilogy, was a stonking success for Netflix. It became a global ratings hit no matter the universal critical disdain – quite literally netting a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes – or wider concerns about its normalisation of rape culture and sexualisation of domestic abuse.
Indeed, while it took the Fifty Shades movies a little while to transition awkwardly into maudlin thriller territory, it’s pretty much been with 365 Days since the beginning, centered as it is around a young woman’s kidnapping, gaslighting, and Stockholm Syndrome-ing into a relationship – and, in this installment, a marriage – of all things.
The clunkily titled 365 Days: This Day opens with the severe Italian stud Massimo (Michele Morrone) now the Don of his mob outfit and tying the knot with his prisoner-cum-lover Laura (Anna-Maria Sieklucka). Hilariously within two minutes of the film opening, Laura tells Massimo, “I don’t have panties,” and the two proceed to go at it, in their wedding finest no less, set to the first of many toe-curlingly corny pop songs littered throughout the too-long 110-minute runtime.
Audiences should pretty much know what they’re in for this time, though, for while less tonally severe than the first film – it makes a few cursory attempts to downplay the creepiness of that original rape-y hook-up – the sequel largely delivers the same bombardment of ridiculous sex, cringe-worthy melodrama, wooden acting, and paradoxically stately cinematography.
Plot-wise, if you much care, This Day sees Laura attempting to come to terms with her near-death experience at the end of the first outing, juxtaposed against her desire to break free of Massimo’s “overprotective” behaviour. That is to say, he basically imprisons her under the guise of guardianship. For Laura, the task is discovering the truly feminist thing to do; accept Massimo’s lavish gifts and live a pampered life in a gilded cage, or consider instead the advances of her impossibly hunky gardener, Nacho (Simone Susinna).
Throw in the continuing gang war nonsense and a truly ridiculous plot twist that’d make even the writers of a telenovela blush, and a full-fat stew of brain cell-annihilating yet ludicrously entertaining stupidity is indeed on the boil, as will surely have wine-swilling viewers cackling with glee.
Those caught off-guard by the first film’s intimate sex scenes, motivated though they were by fundamentally gross power dynamics, might be left disappointed that things feel decidedly less steamy this time. This is especially true for anyone hoping to see more of Michele Morrone, whose Adonis-like form is treated with surprising modesty by the camera during the sequel’s many sex scenes. The cinematic rutting is still more titillating than that in the Fifty Shades movies, for sure, if at all times underscored by an over-quality of ick, the series forever haunted by its problematic origins.
By any conventional metric Massimo and Laura are beautiful people we should enjoy watching fuck, but the array of oddly pedestrian sex – largely distinguished by changing venues and little else – fails to raise the pulse anywhere near the infamous boat scene from the first film. One could almost call the sex complacent, failing to deliver much beyond the most garden variety, tediously standard thrusting and moaning. Even the racier scenes have a Showgirls-adjacent energy that renders them more comical than sexy.
The less strictly penetrative excursions are even more likely to evoke hearty gut-laughs from viewers; an ill-advised outing to a golf course, where Massimo gently putts a golf ball between Laura’s open, skirt-clad legs, feels less sexy than a cynically engineered Ridiculous Moment to be immortalised in social media GIFs until the end of time.
The sex largely takes a back seat in the film’s more plot-heavy second half, where the robotic dialogue dominates most every scene, and melodramatic turns of plot are unfurled amid horridly overwrought pop tunes. In the back-end I also found myself deeply missing Laura’s best pal Olga (Magdalena Lamparska), a considerably more amusing character who at least has the good courtesy to return from her extended absence with the giddy one-liner, “I can’t calm down, I’m Polish.”
The fact that the romance we’re asked to buy into is forged from deeply dodgy beginnings is never forgotten, though this sequel clearly tries to downplay and hand-wave it, with wildly uneven results. Yet considering that neither Massimo nor Laura are particularly likeable people, and it’s a continued strain to accept their relationship, it’s difficult to view this ongoing IP as anything but a failure.
The aforementioned late-film plot twist is almost silly enough to make you think the filmmakers might be in on the joke with it all, yet the resulting tonal car crash – complete with an overegged final showdown that feels like an SNL parody of a John Woo film – is so catastrophic that they couldn’t possibly be.
Regardless this will probably do well for Netflix, who is certainly hoping so considering that the third film has reportedly already been shot. Beyond its cinematographer and technical crew clearly doing far beyond what a project this low-hanging ever needed to do, there’s brutally little here that can be recommended on any genuine level, though fans of trash cinema should certainly get their jollies.
This blandly horny sequel tries in vain to distance itself from its predecessor’s icky foundations, and while its sub-telenovela plot is outrageous enough to be perversely entertaining, by any standard metric it’s truly terrible stuff.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ / Movie: ★
Shaun Munro – Follow me on Twitter for more film rambling.
