The Day Shall Come (2019)

Despite the pedigree writing/directing talent, this is a near-total misfire, with a terrible story - The Day Shall Come review by TB

Before Four Lions, Christopher Morris was known either as an absolute genius & incredible satirist by his fanatical fan base, or an almost Mengele-level evil & sick comedian by a large portion of the media in the UK after the paedophilia episode of Brass Eye (which still to this day is one of the most brilliant & devastating take-downs of the media hysteria ever created.) Whatever he did, there was always a level of controversy which followed him, which most of the time was an extremely lazy trope by his critics to try & diminish his work.

But for many people, he wasn't that well-known outside of that sphere. However that all changed with Four Lions, which was not only a genius, hysterically funny farce, but also extremely financially successful for a low-budget comedy film about suicide bombers. After this success, many people were eagerly awaiting what Morris would tackle next. But whilst this film is certainly provocative, it is also a genuine mess of ideas & set-ups, which is a huge shame considering the real-world events which inspired it.

The FBI have a problem: they need to find new threats which they can then "foil" & claim the credit for. One of their ambitious young agents (Glack) sees online a radical preacher called Moses, who preaches an apocalyptical & violent overthrow of the whites by blacks. Even though, if she actually looked into Moses, she would find out that he was a poor, mentally ill man whose minute congregation was mostly his own family, she decides that this is a threat equal to the 9/11 terror attack. She then begins to, through proxies, fund Moses's totally idiotic & almost impossible delusions, whilst trying to convince her superiors of the imminent danger.

The biggest issue with the film is the script, over & above everything else. To me, it just seemed like it was shot when it wasn't even half ready. In all of Morris's work, there is a deliberately esoteric, highly unusual & often deeply weird theme running through it. As it's worst, you get Nathan Barley (which to me was genuinely unwatchable in every sense, such was it's strangeness.) But at its best you get the irreverent brilliance of Brass Eye, where Morris will set up celebrities or members of the public to comment/react to the most far-fetched but totally seriously staged nonsense.

But in order for the strangeness to be funny, it needs to have some flow either through the narration or actually a grounding which can be satirised. But in this film, that is almost nowhere to be seen. So what you have is a group of actors who go through the motions of acting out the ludicrous ideas that spring from Morris's brain, but almost nothing really gels together, which means you end up watching a very strange sequence of events that makes you think "Errrr OK... What are they doing & why is this funny?"

I also have no doubt that, as with all Morris's work, it was meticulously researched & based on extensive following of these cases as they were brought to trial. And when I watched the interviews with Morris talking about his inspiration for the film, it is absolutely fascinating to just listen to the incredible accounts he has heard/seen, especially around the Liberty City Seven. But none of that translates into what is shown on screen.

And the other thing which The Day Shall Come ends up being, which you would never associate with a Morris work, is boring. There is only so long you can watch a film full of strange, unfunny & extremely idiosyncratic dialogue/events which doesn't land before your brain starts wandering & you wish that there was some of the Four Lions magic to jump-start things.

I did manage to get all the way to the end, but there were several times I could have switched it off. And when it finished, I just felt "Meh" about all of it. Which is something you should never feel at the end of a Morris piece of work