Melbourne International Film Festival 2019: THE DAY SHALL COME

Chris Morris has always been known as a provocateur. His incredible work on British TV with The Day Today, Brass Eye, and Jam contains some of the most biting, seminal comedy you’ll ever see, and his first foray onto the big screen was 2010’s Four Lions, a farce about suicide bombers in the UK. 

He returns to the War on Terror with The Day Shall Come, an acerbic satire about law enforcement, terrorism, and race in America based on ‘hundreds of true stories’.

Bureaucracy

The Day Shall Come is the story of Moses, a well-meaning black man in Miami who heads his own tiny church and who wants to defeat the gentrification of his neighbourhood with magic. Sort of. Moses’ church, made up of his two sidekicks, his wife, and their daughter, is anti-gun, pro-crossbow and big on heart, small on brains. He is the perfect target for the feds who ‘radicalise’ black and brown people, and then arrest them to great acclaim before moving onto their next target. 

Co-written by Jesse Armstrong, there’s a strong vein of Veep-like ineffectiveness and backbiting among the law enforcement characters. Each one is constantly passing the buck while they engage in heinous racial profiling and abuses of power. This manner of rude and cutting dialogue is Armstrong’s bread and butter having written for The Thick of It, Veep, Peep Show, and creating the HBO show, Succession.  

Anna Kendrick’s character, Kendra, is positioned in a more sympathetic role, yet she is still very much on board with the entrapment, continuing to pursue Moses even once it’s clear he’s a harmless idiot and a genuinely good person. The movie does try to have it both ways with her character, but in the end she is just as bad as the other Feds who happily tie the system into knots in order to entrap their innocent prey to get promotions. 

Terrorism/ Comedy

Four Lions was controversial and brilliant because it took a massively taboo topic – home grown radicalised suicide bombers – and made it hilarious with broad comedy and slapstick. It was a strangely cathartic movie as it showed us that the terrorists the media painted out to be evil geniuses who were two steps away from world domination were actually pretty fallible and in some cases incredibly stupid. 

With The Day Shall Come, there is still some of that vibe with Moses’ church but there is a vast gulf between the humour of the Feds, which is all insults and one liners, and the humour of their targets which is based around their naivety and delusional ideas of what they can achieve.

There’s a very big tonal gap between dark jokes about the ethics of targeting black people over brown people and lines about how the targets carry an air horn for summoning an army of dinosaurs. Both aspects are funny but sometimes the styles collide rather than complimenting each other. 

Conclusion: The Day Shall Come

Overall, this is a dark, biting commentary on systemic racism of law enforcement and the weird Kafkaesque nature of the War on Terror. It is also very funny with splashes of very broad silliness.

Marchant Davis gives an incredible debut performance as Moses. He exudes purity at every step even as the walls begin to close in and his mental health starts to fracture. He is devout without a cult leader’s cynicism, and watching the FBI target him and move him around like a game piece is frustrating and heartbreaking. 

The trick with this movie is that you spend 99% of the run time laughing and in a state of shock at the offensive dialogue, only for the final moments to deliver a punchline right to your gut, reminding you that the victims of these stings and entrapment rarely get their happy ending, while the trappers just get promoted and move on to their next target.