The Next 365 Days Review: A Waste of Time in the Truest Form

The third leg of the erotic thriller trilogy 365 Days, The Next 365 Days, follows Laura and Massimo as their relationship hangs by a thread thanks to jealousy and trust issues, while a tenacious and charismatic Nacho does everything in his power to push the two apart.

The movie is based on ‘Kolejne 365 dni’ by Blanka Lipińska and spans almost 2 hours.

-No Spoilers-

The Next 365 Days Review

The Next 365 Days is a tough brawl between sexual montages and dimly lit discos that boast of the former yet again. The Polish supposedly romance drama stunningly and quite blatantly, might I add, rips off the legacy (lol) of Fifty Shades of Grey but picks up only the substandard aspects of the movie that further underwhelms the plot of the latest 365 Days. 

The premise of the first two movies sold an alluring fantasy, that of a hard-working independent woman giving up the atrocities of the professional world and skimming through mediocre men to let a mafia rule their lives in exchange for non-vanilla sex. Going by this reverie, it doesn’t take that same woman to fall in love with Italian mafia kingpin Don Massimo (the entire plot of the 1st film) and inconsequentially fall out of love in the third instalment when Laura, one of the protagonists, realises that getting all her decisions imposed on her isn’t as sexy as she thought.

Also Read: 365 Days Review: Netflix’s Polish Erotica Doesn’t Offer Much

In the shallow worldview of life and love, the plots and story arcs are thrown out like a piece of 5-day-old garbage. The Next 365 Days took the antique plot device of staging the protagonist and antagonist as complete opposites of each other too religiously, leaving little scope for true emotions and unique personalities. While Massimo is dominant and coercive, the new love interest of Laura, Nacho (a gardener: yet another stereotype), is understanding and thoughtful. 

A sudden change of heart, with no epiphany to the character (Massimo) or indication to the audience, post a vigorous family war is the kind of sloppy writing that filmmakers are taught to avoid. A climax that feels like a montage of two people falling in love (when they are most definitely absolutely not), one where you wish the franchise would come to an uneventful end speaks a lot about films that are over-ridden with sexual content but still don’t further any intellectual or financial capabilities. 

When it comes to performances, it’s safe to say after watching all 3 movies of the trilogy, that they are terrible (minced and true). Even though the supporting characters, Laura’s BFF Olga and Domenico, Massimo’s friend and business partner, try (a little too hard) to provide some comic relief, they are burdened with the absolute failure of the script to bring the personalities of their roles alive. They become dispensable pawns in the love story (haha) of Massimo and Laura, which basically consists of intercourse in public spaces and lashing out at each other for genuine reasons, but the screenwriter falls short here. 

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Another impending collapse in the long list of ‘What is wrong with the 365 Days trilogy’ is the dialogues or their absence. There are no real dialogues or conversations between Laura and Massimo in the first 30 minutes of the movie and the first and only real interaction is deprived of authenticity due to the lack of adequate writing. The dialogues take another hit due to the vivid and obvious lack of the screenwriter’s knowledge of the language.

The music is abysmal. As dialogues take a back seat in the film, the emotions of the characters are depicted through the barricade of songs tuned every 5 minutes, which one might think would act as a saving grace, but sadly and quite inevitably doesn’t. 

Final Verdict

We have all seen movies where two people fall in love and cross rivers instead of puddles for each other, but even those films provide a certain lustre of basis, but The Next 365 Days, drunk on its own inadequacy, reluctantly doesn’t. Choreographed sex scenes, dream sequences of your husband and boyfriend making out, nonsensical dialogues and aggression masquerading as passion become the centre of the movie. Even though the film closed with an open ending, The Next 365 Days wrapped both the novel and the film series, as per sources. 

The Next 365 Days is streaming now on Netflix.

Also Read: 365 Days: This Day Review: Michele Morrone and Anna-Maria Sieklucka Movie Loses Steam