365 Days: This Day

The Emptiness of Excess

I still can't quite convince myself that *365 Days: This Day* is a movie in any meaningful sense. It plays more like a luxury-brand reel that has been awkwardly interrupted by plot obligations. The first film became a huge guilty-curiosity object in 2020 by pushing a grotesquely toxic fantasy to the front: a mafia boss kidnaps a woman and gives her a year to love him. This sequel, directed again by Barbara Białowąs and Tomasz Mandes, is supposed to show the aftermath of that arrangement. The surprise is not that it's bad. The surprise is how numb it is.



Nothing here feels shaped for cinema. It feels shaped for an algorithm that has learned viewers enjoy yachts, abs, and drone footage. Dialogue—if we're being generous enough to call it that—keeps getting shoved aside so the film can slide into one more glossy montage: coastline, sunglasses, expensive fabric, bodies in soft focus, repeat. Early on, Laura (Anna-Maria Sieklucka) wanders through a giant mansion feeling neglected by her husband Massimo (Michele Morrone). The scene should tell us something about loneliness or power or regret. Instead, the camera caresses marble and décor as if Laura were just another luxury item on display. When Massimo enters, the edit instantly breaks the encounter into disconnected poses and music-video fragments. They don't really relate to each other. They model proximity.



Morrone is almost interesting to watch for the wrong reasons. Off-screen he's a musician, and that energy leaks into the performance in a very odd way; he acts like someone perpetually composing a brooding album cover. The shoulders roll forward, the neck stays rigid, the stare is fixed just past the other person. It projects dominance in theory, never in practice. Sieklucka has the much crueler assignment. She has to embody a woman who is supposedly yearning for freedom while happily absorbing the cars, clothes, and lifestyle supplied by the man who kidnapped her. Most of the time her face settles into a blank pout, which honestly feels like a sane response to the material.

Eventually the script remembers it is meant to have conflict, so it introduces a rival gangster, Nacho (Simone Susinna), to turn the whole thing into a love triangle. Really, though, it's less a triangle than a swap: Laura choosing between one sculpted, absurdly wealthy criminal and another. Critics were ruthless with this sequel, and with reason. *Variety* didn't even bother dressing the verdict up, calling it "piping hot trash." Hard to argue.

But writing it off as trash is almost too easy. The thing that sticks with me is how desolate its fantasy actually is. Under all the designer surfaces and choreographed sex, nobody here seems to enjoy anyone else's company. It's a world of beautiful bodies and vacant eyes, everyone waiting for the next song cue so they can stop pretending to talk.