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Living on the planet Earth here in 2017, there is no shortage of ways in which we can envision the world falling into dystopia. Armed nuclear conflict, rising sea waters, violent domestic strife, exhaustion of natural resources … you name it, we’ve been confronted with it. The movies have always been there to help us give shape to these end-of-the-world fears, of course. Sometimes they even give us new things to be worried about (see: anybody who’s gotten into “zombie prepping”). The new Netflix original movie What Happened to Monday? welcomes a multi-tiered wave of possible dystopian futures into its universe, telling its story of septuplets hunted by the government. The result is an at-times-overstuffed and dizzying film that is nevertheless an effective thriller thanks to the committed performance of its star.
In the universe of What Happened to Monday?, the world is struggling to feed its people. This was the driving dystopian dilemma at the center of the Netflix movie Okja from earlier this year. But we’re not done yet! In its efforts to genetically modify greater crops of food, the government (which at this point is an all-world government, always a fave of the paranoid dystopia crowd) ended up creating an epidemic of multiple births, thus making the overpopulation problem even worse. So the government decided to institute a one-child-per-family policy, a concept that belongs in the hall of fame of dystopian fiction.
Enter Terrence Settman (Willem Dafoe), whose daughter dies in childbirth delivering illegal septuplets, who then takes it upon himself to hide the children — all girls — and give them names corresponding to the days of the week. Of course, they can’t use those names publicly. They can’t exist publicly, not together at least. They have to essentially take turns living the life of their common assumed identity, Karen Settman. The bulk of the movie is set with “Karen” as an adult, played by Noomi Rapace, but we get plenty of flashbacks to Dafoe raising the girls and teaching them how to elide capture by the Child Allocation Bureau. He’s loving but tough, and most of all willing to do anything to keep his girls safe, something that’s made most demonstrably clear in a harrowing moment when one of the septuplets comes home with a severe finger injury, and Dafoe has to ensure that all the girls keep a uniform appearance.
What Happened to Monday? could have probably turned into a spectacularly dark bit of body horror, but instead director Tommy Wirkola, working off of a script that was originally intended for The Imitation Game and Passengers director Morten Tyldum, goes for a suspense thriller, kicking off when one day, the titular Monday septuplet doesn’t return home from “Karen”‘s job. Suddenly the septuplets must figure out what’s happened to their sister and how they can save her without exposing themselves to capture or worse.
There is obviously more than a little debt owed here to Orphan Black, which is clearly an inspiration for this story of identical-looking women trying to unwind the government conspiracy that’s entrapped them. Noomi Rapace may not quite be working on Tatiana Maslany levels (though who is, really), but even if the septuplets may not be so easily distinguished from each other, Rapace gets to the depths of some extreme emotions and proves herself to be quite the capable action heroine.
But if you’re looking for one big, campy reason to watch this movie, let it be Glenn Close as the government minister in charge of enforcing the one-child policy (and along with it a whole other host of repressive and deceptive population-control schemes). She joins a long and distinguished roster of the world’s best actresses who have been conscripted into playing dystopian authoritarians. Or have you forgotten Kate Winslet in Divergent. Or Julianne Moore in The Hunger Games. Or Meryl Streep in The Giver. Or Tilda Swinton in Snowpiercer. She plays the impeccably named Nicolette Cayman, a publicly meek but privately ruthless women determined to make the hard choices and ensure humanity’s survival and all that good stuff.
Close represents a movie that could have stood to get a good deal campier and more fun, but paranoid thriller is what the dystopia genre demands, and that’s what we get. With Rapace anchoring the action, the story is harrowing and compelling. And if nothing else, it’s one more nightmare to add to our cabinet of ways the world could possibly get worse.
