Anna Kendrick plays a dysfunctional FBI agent tricking an idealistic preacher into plotting terror in The Day Shall Come, Chris Morris’ ballsy, very funny follow-up to festival hit Four Lions.
Despite the serious subject, Morris gives The Day Shall Come a brisk and upbeat tone. Some situations are so silly, you can’t help but laugh.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2019
The Day Shall Come 2019
Based on a hundred true stories’ reads the opening title card to Chris Morris’ latest political satire, his first film since the riotous Four Lions (NZIFF10).
Moses (impressive newcomer Marchánt Davis) is an impoverished preacher who heads the Star of Six, a congregation of six including his wife and child. However, the peaceful sect’s belief system and Moses’ prayers are unorthodox enough – he believes that both God and Satan communicate with him through a duck and that the CIA can summon dinosaurs with an air horn – to attract the attention of Kendra (Anna Kendrick), an FBI agent keen to impress her boss. The film’s scathing vision of the war on terror lands plenty of big laughs as dysfunctional FBI agents try to tempt Moses while he finds new and weird ways of not biting.
“The Day Shall Come is an outrageous, farcical take on the FBI and their terrorist witch-hunts… Over-the-top and bittersweet – perhaps because reality isn’t as far off as we’d like – the irony resonates… Performances are convincing to the point of hilarity. The FBI is laughably inept, improvising their daily grind by incubating terrorists – with casual indifference to other lives.” ― Dylan Kai Dempsey, ioncinema.com
“There are plenty of absurd and bleak turns in this crazy, satirical story about the misfortunate, their hopeless circumstances and the way callous, asshole law enforcement (played by… Kendrick, Denis O’Hare, Adam David Thompson, and Jim Gaffigan) abuses and manipulates the people in these communities to fit their own narratives, quotas, and agendas.” ― Ryan Oliver, The Playlist