The 365 Days Cinematic Universe keeps expanding! The softcore porn series is back with another full movie, titled . The original 365 Days became a surprise pandemic-era hit when it was released on Netflix in 2020. To refresh your memory, it’s about an Italian mafioso who kidnaps a Polish hotel worker and gives her a full year, or 365 Days if you’re nasty, to fall in love with him while held hostage on his yacht.
ping as an established female sex fantasy, with its complex layers of control and consent, is too big and tricky a topic for this review. What 365 Days does is create a kind of aesthetic safe space for that fantasy. With its thin characters, bad acting, laughably threadbare plot, music-video direction, and sex that’s explicit only to a point, 365 Days is porn-but-not. It has neither the emotional stakes of actual drama nor the stigma of actual smut. You can laugh it off. (Perhaps this also explains why people choose to watch stuff like this even when it sits right next to the full-frontal nudity and explicit unsimulated sex of something like , which was also on Netflix for a while.)
365 Days: This Day frequently slumps into a torpid haze of wheeling, slow-motion montages that don’t really distinguish between shots of sex, shopping, supercars, and heartwarming family dinners. The wealth-porn is as prominent as the porn-porn. There’s a carpet of numb Europop over the whole thing, some of it sung by Morrone himself. (One choice couplet: “I’m a little bit of a psycho / I’m driving you like a Lambo.”)
365 Days is currently the #1 movie streamed on Netflix. The movie poster that you see is the one that got me banned from . Yeah. Go figure. Anyway, the movie itself is exponentially more provocative than the poster and is just downright out and out porn. I don’t have anything against porn. I often watch it when I am suffering from insomnia. I can also state with confidence that I have watched amateur porn with better writing and acting than was delivered by this movie.
Lizzy Dening, founder of , a platform featuring interviews with survivors of sexual violence, is concerned that 365 Days plays into insidious myths. “The one that often stops survivors coming forward, that can eat away at them, is that, on one level, the survivor was to blame, that somehow they ‘wanted’ it.” On making Laura dress up to go to a so he can complete some nefarious business deal, Massimo is furious when Laura is assaulted by another guy, whom he shoots dead before blaming Laura for both the and her attack, because she was dressed “like a slut”. “He has this weird gentleman’s agreement that he won’t actually her – and this is meant to him a hero?” says Dening. “ as a romantic device spreads a damaging message, particularly to young people watching. And let’s not forget, this isn’t a niche porn film – when I watched, it was ranked No2 on Netflix.”
