The only words that matter in Day Night Day Night come in the opening minutes. A young woman whispers to herself on a train, so softly it needs to be subtitled (both for clarity and emphasis), rapidly rattling off a litany of different ways one way may die, from the mundane to the extraordinary. She recites with a breathless cadence akin to an incantation, as if she’s praying to, pleading with, someone, like she’s trying to steel her resolve and convince this other person.
Her last words, before disembarking for an intense and troubling 48-hour ordeal, are “I have only one death. I want it to be for you.”
We never find out this woman’s name (played by Luisa Williams), nor who this “you” she addresses is. Nor do we find out who her anonymous ski masked handlers are, who sequester her in a hotel room in New Jersey for a night and a day. We never find out any details of their sinister agenda, nor ever know why she consents to being strapped with a bomb and set loose to wander Times Square.
All we see in the 95-minute run time of Julia Loktev’s crime thriller Day Night Day Night, all we ever know for sure, is a profound lack of hope festering into desperation, a deceptive calm collapsing into breakdown. There is no release, no reason, no detonation, no resolution. The film’s drama, its very real and palpable tension, is of this one moment of calm before the storm, this singularity which is actually the entirety of the story, a pivot upon which all else turns, held for an improbably and uncomfortably long time.
Day Night Day Night is among those rare breed of films which are unbearably tense precisely because of their focus on the tedious and the mundane routines that surround and herald something cataclysmic. Most of the first half, we see the womanl doing little else but bathing, brushing her teeth, sitting, and sleeping, as she prepares for her last day alive.
The second half, the camera accompanies her as she wanders about Times Square, eating her last meals (mostly a variety of junk food), trying to muster up the “courage” to push the button. Nothing happens in these scenes; yet everything does. We see the worlds of her inner life course across her face, moments of clarity and devastating doubt, frustration, hopelessness, a breakdown of faith, failure. It is all supremely uncomfortable to watch.
Some not have the patience Day Night Day Night requires of its viewers; not so much because of the ostensible surface subject, but more because of its rigorous and demanding stylization, its refusal to compromise to the conventional template of films that deal in terror and fear. There is no catharsis here.
Day Night Day Night‘s seductive power is in the visceral terror of contemplating suicide bombers wandering US cities, but in putting those of us who live in such cities in the very head of one such person, thus refusing viewers a chance for escape. The entirety of the story focuses on the woman – she is in every single frame – and then mostly on her face.
There is a harsh purity to her stark beauty, like she’s been drained of the color of life, which reinforces Day Night Day Night‘s drained visual palette. It’s like we are gazing upon ghosts wandering adrift in a purgatorial nightmare. The story, however, is as much about her gazing at “us” as it is us gazing at her. She is in our head and we in hers, the sound mix drawing us into her very breath, her lungs. We run the risk of losing ourselves in her, and this is why the film is so potent.
Day Night Day Night is a film teetering on the verge of this dark, dark void. It is nothing we want to see, but perhaps exactly what we need.