Noomi Rapace hasn’t quite gotten the attention she completely deserves. While she was the acclaimed lead of the original Swedish “Millennium” trilogy as the titular Lisbeth Salander, and went on to large roles in films such as “Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows” and the lead role in Ridley Scott’s “Prometheus,” she has been noticeably absent since. Scott wrote her character off in the “Prometheus” follow-up, “Alien: Covenant,” and her three largest roles since in “Dead Man Down,” “The Drop” and “Child 44” all severely underperformed at the box-office. For an actress of her immense talent, her treatment by Hollywood has been pretty crappy in the past few years, and I missed her dearly. When the French character posters dropped in June for the film “Seven Sisters” (renamed “What Happened to Monday” for American release), I was interested immediately in a film where I could get seven separate Rapace performances in one. While I was a bit disappointed to see the film not make it to the big screen in America, being distributed as a Netflix Original Film, I still had my hopes set for Rapace’s return to the screen.

Now, while “What Happened to Monday” is not high art by any means, it damn sure might be the most entertaining sci-fi film I’ve seen this summer, and that goes up with “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets,” even if it isn’t quite as batshit crazy.

In 2073, the world’s population has grown so out of control and a new government regime instills the Child Allocation Act, headed by the Child Allocation Bureau led by Nicolette Cayman (Glenn Close), is a new law limiting one child per family. In the case of multiples, one child will be kept alive while the others will be placed into cryosleep until the crisis ends. Terrence Settman (Willem Defoe) is the father of a young woman who dies during the secret childbirth of her septuplets. When Terrence takes them into hiding, he assigns them the names Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, permitting each to leave their home once a week to assume the identity of Karen Settman, which each of the girls will share information about each of their lives to keep the façade up. This works as a successful plan until 30 years later, when the sisters, now grown (Noomi Rapace as all seven), face an issue when Monday doesn’t return home after her shift at work. When the girls suspect something suspicious at hand, they must invesitgate the disappearance of their sister and the regime behind it.

“What Happened to Monday” is an incredibly ambitious film, but one that, despite being a French indie film just like “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets,” doesn’t have the luxury of an inflated budget like the former, meaning that much of the film relies on tight environments and the wits of the seven sisters. The thing about “What Happened to Monday” is that the true spectacle doesn’t come in its visuals, but in Rapace’s performance. This is a stellar turn for the actress on all counts, creating interesting, yet familiarly similar sisters each with their own distinctions. The way that Rapace interacts with herself is so seamless and natural that I felt like I was watching “The Parent Trap” on crack. Rapace finds a tick in each of the sisters that makes viewing their interactions and how they handle each situation super entertaining to watch. Lindsay Lohan, eat your heart out, there’s a new family of multiples in town.

Supporting actors, like Defoe and Close, don’t have as much to do in the film as Rapace, and why should they? Defoe plays things pretty close to the chest in flashbacks, but Close hams it up in a very entertaining, but never distracting way. Close is never schmaltzier than the film around her, and her take on a Hillary Clinton meets Mao Zedong meets Emperor Palpatine leader, while brief in content, is never anything but entertaining to watch.

And that’s the thing about “What Happened to Monday,” it’s not subtle, nor is it seamless in its visual effects, but goddamn it if it isn’t entertaining as hell. And that’s where “What Happened to Monday” might have the leg up over “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.” This film is one that might not be as aesthetically beautiful, but it’s one that is far more rooted in its characters and performances, something that “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets” found itself lacking in, especially in its two leads. With Rapace giving such impressive performances and Wirkola not holding back when it comes to the film and its content, “What Happened to Monday” is more of the feeling of a Euro-camp movie than anything Luc Besson has made in years.

Speaking of not holding back, “What Happened to Monday” is shockingly R-rated (the film is technically not rated, as Netflix doesn’t rate its films through the MPAA), not only in its graphic violence, but also in its filthy mouth and a particularly graphic sex scene that made viewing the film with my mom a bit weird as it simply came out of nowhere. This sort of freedom to be as lurid as it wants to be is something that made “What Happened to Monday” feel so much more organic and gritty than I expected it to be. While the word “fuck” is thrown around a bit more than it might be in a normal world (and that’s saying something coming from my profane ass), it’s still a nice change of pace to see an ambitious sci-fi film go so hard into its obscene side that it feels more like a world that would exist in the remnants of our current one.

With that sort of freedom, “What Happened to Monday” also gets really dark, much darker than you would think it would from the trailer. I won’t really go into much detail beyond that, but “What Happened to Monday” is not a film that holds back, minces words or pulls punches of any kind. Don’t expect alls well to end well at all times.

“What Happened to Monday” has the chance to be a heavy-handed political statement of a film that relies far too much on its premise’s message to deliver anything of note, but Wirkola pulls back the political undertones in lieu of focusing more on the film’s plot and the sisters behind the film. Of course, its message is clear from its premise alone, but this isn’t a Participant Media-funded, politically charged action flick. This is much more “Resident Evil” than it is “Divergent.”

But that’s where you need to stand for “What Happened to Monday” to work for you. This is not a high-brow sci-fi action flick by any means, nor is it as slickly beautiful as anything Marvel or Lucasfilm is putting out, but it’s a clever, sly, lurid, occasionally schmaltzy and incredibly entertaining sci-fi thriller that is worth seeing for Rapace’s performances alone. Still, being able to sit down to a film that’s relatively campy, while still remaining emotionally engaging, thematically challenging and entertaining as hell without sacrificing any sort of contextual quality, and you have one hell of a fun ride. I wish I could’ve seen this film on the big screen to show off the visual merits it does have, but lets just be real here, “What Happened to Monday” is a film with seven too many pairs of balls for any theatrical distributor to have touched it, and that’s when Netflix plays the White Knight pretty sweetly. Play on if this is what we can have, play on.

4/5

Photo courtesy of Netflix

Directed by: Tommy Wirkola
Starring: Noomi Rapace, Marwan Kenzari, Christian Rubeck, Pål Sverre Hagen, introducing Clara Reed, with Willem Defoe, and Glenn Close.
Runtime: 123 minutes
Rating: Not rated
Now streaming on Netflix.

Netflix presents, a Netflix Original Film, SND and Vendôme Pictures present, a Rafaella De Laurentiis, Vendôme Pictures production, in co-production with Nexus Factory and uMedia, in association with uFund, with the participation of OCS, Canal+, M6, W9, Wallonie, a film by Tommy Wirkola, “What Happened to Monday”