Posted by Branching away from zombie flicks and into sci-fi, I just watched What Happened to Monday not knowing much about it other than it was listed under SFF on Netflix. The title didn’t do much for me, but it made sense once I watched it.
This is set in the future where the human population has overburdened the planet, there’s not enough food and water to go around, so the USA has instituted a one child only policy complete with its own federal department and task force. Any child discovered to be a sibling, often times the younger sibling, is taken away in a truck and the parents are told they are going in for “processing”. When a sibling is “processed” it’s said that they are put into a cryogenic sleep until they will be awakened when the world’s population has gone down, and there are enough resources to thaw them out.
30 years ago, right after the declaration of one child only law, 7 sisters were born at once, and the mother died in childbirth. They are all identical which struck me as very, very odd. Identical triplets are rare enough, but 7 siblings all the same? That would mean the egg split 7 different times. I’m pretty sure fertility drugs wouldn’t make an egg do that, it just makes the body produce more eggs and release them at the same time, creating a bunch of siblings, but not identical. Anyway, moving on. The grandfather names them after the days of the week which felt a little shoehorned in to make the plot of the movie easier to follow. Each sibling is allowed out of the house on the day of the week they are named after, no two are allowed out at the same time and they’ve managed to pull this off for decades.
A sister goes to work then doesn’t come back home, once it hits midnight the other sisters start to panic. Monday has never been late before, and she’s the type who would call if something goes wrong. Tuesday is forced to leave the house even though Monday is still missing, then she goes missing as well.
There was a lot of action in this movie and I wasn’t expecting that, and the action isn’t just fluff either – some of the sisters don’t make it out and it made the stakes higher and made the danger feel much more real, so it gets points for that.
However, there are some major plot holes in the movie or just things that make no sense. Once Tuesday has gone missing, it’s obvious that the higher-ups are onto them and it’s only a matter of time before they start breaking down their door. And they do, they walk up to the front of the building armed to the teeth and kill the guard at the front door of the apartment complex, followed by a huge shootout that every neighbor on the block should have heard….. and after all of that drama and suspicious activity, the sisters stay put. The cops never show up to figure out what went down despite multiple rounds of ammunition going off and there wasn’t a second task force sent for days afterward either. None of that made much sense to me.
I can’t imagine what the actress had to do to get ready for this movie, she played 7 different people and had to memorize an entire movie’s script not just “one part”. She did a pretty good job too, not all of her persona’s for the seven different sisters sat well with me, but that wasn’t really her fault. The directors or the writers should have done a little better job with making the different sisters a little less radically different. They went a little overboard with making each sister so totally different from the others that the personalities were exaggerated a bit too much. I saw Defoe and Glen Close in this and was super excited for their roles, and although they did fine in their roles, they were very small parts in the movie.
All in all, this was an okay movie, if you like Big Bad Government movies and conspiracies this one may appeal to you more than it did to me. I didn’t hate it though, it was just aggressively okay.
Final Score: 6/10
IMDB: 6.9/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 59%