365 Days: This Day Review: Michele Morrone's erotic sequel is chaotic and a muddled mess

365 Days: This Day 

365 Days: This Day Cast: Michele Morrone, Anna-Maria Sieklucka

365 Days: This Day Director: Barbara Białowąs, Tomasz Mandes

365 Days: This Day Platform: Netflix

365 Days: This Day Stars: 2/5

As a hot-and-bothered globe worried about a lockdown summer in June 2020, Netflix put a Polish-Italian sexual thriller called 365 Days into its algorithm. A softcore vision of yacht sex, thick accents, and problematic consent problems, it comes off as a low-rent Fifty Shades of Grey: flashier, trashier, tamer and more insulting at the same time, and much more stupid and corny. It was an undeniably terrible movie, but it was also a huge success. Interestingly, the film received a lot of criticism for its content, and when it became clear that the streaming service would not make the same mistake again, it simply declared that a sequel is already in the works. We're now in April 2022, and the sequel, named '365 Days: This Day,' has finally arrived on Netflix.

The title 365 Days: This Day is very appropriate, considering that the sequel seems like it goes on for 365 days. Unless you consider two people having sex while loud, irritating music plays for the first 25 minutes of a narrative, This Day takes long to get into its storyline. If we persevere through these scenarios, we'll be rewarded with the main meat of the dish, but it'll be tough, cold, and unappealing by then. That aforementioned meal is the cinematic equivalent of a dull, watered-down melodrama rife with clichés and thinner than many viewers' tolerance heading into this one. This Day, based on the second of Lipiska's novels, begins off where the previous film left off — kind of. 365 Days' cliffhanger finale is brutally swept aside in one of the awful lurches and sloppy, illogical elisions that have become the sad hallmark of filmmakers Barbara Biaows and Tomasz Mandes. It's finally Laura and Massimo's wedding day!

Laura (Anna Maria Sieklucka) and Massimo (Michele Morrone) are now happily married. Laura lost her unborn child in the car accident at the end of the first film, but she's keeping that - and the fact that she was pregnant in the first place – a secret from her new husband. Olga (Magdalena Lamparska), her only confidante, is otherwise occupied by a burgeoning relationship with Massimo's associate Domenico (Otar Saralidze), so Laura is left to play the quiet, abiding housewife, a role she quickly comes to despise given that the responsibilities of a Mafia Don's spouse are simply to sit around and be pampered – for her protection, Massimo insists.

ALSO READ: 5 INTERESTING facts about 365 Days star Michele Morrone that prove he is a man of many talents

ALSO READ: 5 INTERESTING facts about 365 Days star Michele Morrone that prove he is a man of many talents

For the first half of the film, nothing else unfolds. This Day begins as a feeble, superfluous frame for fantasy sex, squandering any narrative tension the prior film had and in no apparent haste to establish its own. A telenovela-level melodrama builds to a hesitant boil in the second half. Massimo's ex has a sinister agenda, Massimo has siblings he hasn't addressed, and Laura is visited by the enigmatic, sexy gardener Nacho, who wears a hat with the word "c***" written on it. It's all incredibly goofy in an almost adorable sense, yet it's all done so sloppily that it can still grow monotonous and leave you in a muddled mess.

To summarise, the sequel to 365 Days is just as full of sex montages set to pop music, features a few sequences that will raise an eyebrow or two, and has a charitably poor grade of acting and writing. Everyone participating was apparently cast based on how wonderful they appeared in the throes of simulated orgasm. However, there is nothing else here. If you remove all the montages — it's not only sex, but also shopping, eating, and driving fast vehicles along scenic mountain roads - there are only approximately 15 minutes of story left. As a consequence, we have this muddled, garbled mess that seems like a poor soap rip-off and an embarrassing commercial for an erotica thriller.