(POSTER PROVIDED VIA GOOGLE)
***WARNING: REVIEW MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS***
STARRING:
Noomi Rapace as The Settman Sisters
Glenn Close as Nicolette Cayman
Willem Dafoe as Terrence Settman
Marwan Kenzari as Adrian Knowles
Christian Rubeck as Joe
(TRAILER PROVIDED VIA YOUTUBE.COM)
"What Happened to Monday" takes place in a dystopian future where the world is over populated and the only known and practiced path for humanities survival is for families to be limited to having one child. If a family has second, third or more children, the child is taken from their family and put under suspended animation (frozen) until the world is in a better state. This is all done by the Child Allocation Bureau (CAB) which is lead by Nicolette Cayman, the foremost authority on anything CAB related.
In "What Happened to Monday," we follow an individual named Karen Settman. Karen Settman seems to lead a somewhat normal life with a normal job. She is locked into her daily routine. Or is she? Is Karen actually Karen? Karen Settman is actually a made up identity based off of their mother of the same name. Notice what I did there? The word "their." This current Karen Settman is actually more than one person living the same life. Karen is made up of septuplets. That's right, there are seven identical twins that make up the life of Karen Settman. Each twin named after the day of the week they are out in the world. Monday goes out every Monday as Karen, Tuesday goes out every Tuesday as Karen and so on and so on and this is repeated every day every week for as long as they are alive.
The original Karen Settman (their mother) died while giving birth to the sisters. Their grandfather, Terrence, is the one who decided not to turn them into the CAB and came up with the elaborate plan to give them a single existence. They are all complete individuals while in their apartment, but each plays the role of Karen Settman to stay alive and in the world the only way possible. Terrence used his genius to create systems, idealistic and machine, to help them fool the world. If one was hurt and a the cut left a scare, Terrence would make sure all of the twins remained physically identical. One twin sneaked out one day and ended up losing part of her thumb in an accident. He then had to cut off the same piece of thumb from each twin to make sure no one would be able to tell the difference. Was it hard for Terrence to do these things? Yes it was. And this emotion is shown in the film.
Terrence did everything he could possibly think of to keep these girls from danger. He loved them all very much. Then one Monday, Monday didn't come home. She disappeared. No one knew what happened to her. The sisters didn't know what to do. They decided that Tuesday would go out the next day on Tuesday and try to retrace Monday's steps. This is where the story picks up and the action and suspense really hit overdrive.
I'm not going to talk about the rest of the movie because it really deserves to be watched. Netflix has been really getting better with the quality film they release for a long time now and "What Happened to Monday is no different. This has been my favorite performance I've seen from Noomi Rapace. I think she was very convincing playing seven different people, no wait make that eight. Don't forget, she also played Karen Settman in addition to the seven sisters. Willem Dafoe was amazing as always and Glenn Close did an outstanding job believing she was doing what the world needed. All around great by all actors.
I give the film 4 out of 5 stars. Please do yourself a favor and watch this film if you have Netflix. My only issue with it is that you need to have Netflix to watch it at this time. It's a fun ride.
