Sunday 10 March 2019

What happened to Monday (3½ Stars)


In the mid 20th Century environmental problems have caused fertility rates to drop to dangerous levels. People turn to fertility drugs to have babies, but this leads to an abundance of multiple births. The world's population shoots up, exhausting the Earth's natural resources, so the population needs to be culled. A one-child-per-family law is strictly enforced by an organisation called the Child Allocation Bureau (CAB). In the case of multiple births, only one child is allowed to live a normal life; the others are frozen in cryo-chambers and left to sleep until the problem of overpopulation has been solved.

A woman called Karen Settman has seven identical daughters, then dies in childbirth. The grandfather of the septuplets doesn't want to give up any of them. He names them after the seven days of the week, from Monday to Sunday. They all have different personalities, but he trains them to act as if they were one person. Each day only one of them goes out in public, calling themselves Karen Settman, doing the same job in turns.

Then one day Monday doesn't come home. The others suspect that she's been arrested or killed by the CAB. Tuesday goes out the next day, but she's killed. Each day another of the sisters goes out to find Monday, but none of them return.

This is an exciting thriller, with an excellent performance by Noomi Rapace as all seven of the sisters. It's easy to recognise which sister she is by the way she talks. My relatively low rating is due to my dislike of dystopian post-apocalyptic films.

In America and the UK the film is available exclusively on Netflix, but it's been released on DVD and Blu-ray in Germany.

P.S. I wrote this review on 21st March, but I backdated the post to the day I watched the film.

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