The Day Shall Come
Like a tragicomic B-side to the more brutal Four Lions, Chris Morris leads us inside the surrealist logic of an FBI agency who are arming tin-pot terrorists so they can take them down
Chris Morris’s blistering first feature, Four Lions, took us inside a cell of would-be jihadists whose idiotic bumblings didn’t dampen the savagery of their aims. Star of Six, the Miami-based religion at the centre of The Day Shall Come, are a similarly cockeyed bunch but nowhere near as dangerous. Their army could fit comfortably inside a Mini Cooper, while the closest thing they have to a WMD is an air horn that summons dinosaurs. When the local chapter of the FBI is faced with such innocuous would-be revolutionaries, there's only one thing to do: arm Star of Six to the teeth so that this terrorist threat can be neutralised.
Morris is the master of this kind of down-is-up logic, and here he pushes the Kafkaesque satire to the kind of delirious levels only he (and perhaps Armando Iannucci) could get away with. Craven careerists with an aversion to common sense and human decency are the true danger to the world in The Day Shall Come, which can't provide the same heart-in-mouth power of Four Lions' caustic finale, although it’s no less tragic.
Released 11 Oct by Entertainment One; certificate 15