Marchánt Davis, Anna Kendrick, Danielle Brooks, Denis O’Hare, Jim Gaffigan
British writer-director and master satirist Chris Morris makes a welcome return to the big screen with The Day Shall Come. His first film in nine years following the acclaimed Four Lions, shrouded in secrecy until its premiere at SXSW 2019 (where it received excellent reviews), it’s a wild, riotous farce exploiting the absurdities of post-9/11 FBI sting operations.
In Miami, where poverty sits uneasily alongside wealth and gentrification, impoverished, mentally unstable preacher Moses (Marchánt Davis) leads a small, haphazard band of fellow African-American locals. Angered by racial inequities, they’re ostensibly planning a race war (but a hilariously bumbling and ineffectual one) when FBI agent Kendra (Anna Kendrick), who’s trying to identify terrorists before they strike, spots an opportunity to exploit, and capitalise on, his madcap revolutionary dreams.
Alarmingly it’s ‘based on a hundred true stories’, with Morris admitting that many of the plot’s more fantastical elements have in fact taken place, making its satirical indictment of US homeland security feel especially scathing. Hectic and unhinged within its short, sharp 87 minutes, The Day Shall Come proves Morris’s sensibilities are still uniquely suited to the absurdities of the contemporary political scene, with the ability to drive home devastating truths alongside laugh out loud comedy.