What Happened To Monday

The original Netflix film "What Happened to Monday" is a dystopian romp that plays like a blend of "Orphan Black" with any number of similarly-themed action movies.

The time is 40 or 50 years from now. Plant Earth is swarming with humanity, thanks to pollutants that cause a sharp increase in the number of live births any given pregnancy yields. (Apparently, birth defects also rise sharply, though none are in evidence as the film progresses.) One such birth results in seven identical baby girls; their mother doesn't survive the experience, in part because she's chosen to go to a hospital where multiple births are not reported to an increasingly draconian government. A new law has been imposed that limits each family to a single child, and no more. With their mother dead, the seven infants are left in the care of their grandfather, a man named Terrence (Willem Dafoe), who somehow manages to care for all of them on his own and keep their existence a closely-guarded secret. He names them for the days of the week -- a seemingly whimsical choice that turns out to have a pragmatic purpose.

In a series of flashbacks that take place throughout the film, we see how the girls grow up in Terrence's large apartment. (Despite desperate overcrowding, it seems their building is mostly empty.) The girls are confined indoors until they are old enough to understand the ways of the world, and the need to keep their secret. For one thing, if they are ever found out, they will suffer the fate that all "siblings" suffer: They will be removed from their home and family and put into cryogenic sleep for decades or centuries, until the population crisis eases.

Once he deems them able to keep a secret, Terrence allows the girls to venture outside and explore the world. But they can only go out one at a time, each of them on the day after which she is named. So begins a complicated juggling act in which all seven girls -- who grow up over the next thirty years to be young women (all played by Noomi Rapace) -- carefully don identical wigs and makeup, dress in a severe, professional manner, and go to work at a large bank each day, splitting up the work week among themselves.

But though they all portray the same identity to the world at large -- their common identity is "Karen Settman," and this persona is tough, aloof, and industrious -- at home they have developed very distinct personalities. Monday is the task master, focused on details and protocols; the defiant, rebellious Thursday rubs along under protest, never making her dissatisfaction a secret; Tuesday is a stoner who relies on pot brownies to make it through life; Saturday is a bleach blonde with a sexy appearance but a shy demeanor; Friday is brainy, driven, and self-effacing, and her extra efforts earn them all respect at work, such that in time "Karen Settman" is up for a big promotion.

"Karen" has a rival for the coveted new job in the person of Jerry (P�l Sverre Hagen), and when Jerry threatens "Karen" one Monday -- telling her, "I'm on to you" -- Monday (the sister, not the day) instantly worries that their secret is out. When Monday fails to return home and Friday cannot pinpoint her location (they all wear wrist gadgets that function pretty much like cell phones), Monday's fear spreads through the rest of the week. Er, the family.

Eventually, come Tuesday morning, the next sister -- yes, the one named Tuesday -- is compelled to venture outside despite her sister not yet being home, a desperate act for which there has only ever been a single precedent, and it didn't end well. (Here's a hint: What do you do when there are seven of you and one of your number loses part of a finger in a skateboarding accident? I leave it to you to do the math, though you might not care to tot up the sum with your left pointer.) What happens next... well, let's just say that secrets, some of them sinister, are something that both the family and the government's Child Allocation Bureau have in common.

The Child Allocation Bureau -- CAB, for short -- is one of those wild nightmare agencies teat run riot in dystopian fiction, an overreaching entity that seemingly combines all the worst elements of everyone's assumptions about both the political left and the right. It's run by a scientist, Dr. Nicolette Cayman (Glenn Close), whose goals are eminently reasonable and yet ruthlessly fascistic. Before long, CAB agents are assailing the family's home, carrying out assassinations of seemingly random acquaintances, and generally raising hell in an ever more desperate attempt to keep a lid on things. Cayman, preparing for a run at Parliament, worries that she will lose credibility if news of the outlaw family ever breaks; the seven sisters, for their part, would simply like to stay alive.

The film's basic premise is problematic and fraught with impracticalities. (How do seven siblings make do on the resources allotted to one? How do their neighbors never notice anything odd, when even the doorman picks up on strange inconsistencies? Do they even have neighbors? If not, how is it they have a doorman?) The action sequences pit unarmed civilians against highly trained (and, with a single helpful exception, sadistically murderous) paramilitary soldiers, and yet the sisters hold their own in various skirmishes (though not all of them, sadly, survive). The CAB agents seem oddly incompetent, and even though there are reasons offered for some of their puzzling lapses, those reasons don't really convince.

But you don't watch movies like this to be convinced; you watch to cheer for the good guys and hiss at the bad ones. There's plenty here that hews so close to well-worn tropes that you can guess how where it's all going, and even predict a good number of the various twists along the way. Even so, there are some genuine, and even poignant, surprises.

This populist puff of a movie is highly watchable, and Rapace makes it entertaining with her astonishing performances, but even as you root for the sisters you might be troubled by a deeper moral concern. Yes, Dr. Cayman's actions are evil, but maybe she has a point; if there's a viable alternative to the eventual need to limit our numbers, what might that be? That, alas, is a question for some other film.