76 Days Review

Toronto FIlm Festival | #4 | 76 Days

To wrap up my time with the Toronto International Film Festival, I decided to review one of the festival's most topical films. 76 Days is a documentary made up of footage from a single hospital attempting desperately to deal with the original coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China during the 76 days the city was under complete lockdown. With all of the anti-Chinese sentiment the outbreak has courted amongst xenophobic Americans (I am talking about anti-Chinese ethnicity, not anti-Chinese state), this humanizing look at the struggles and desperation of the citizens and doctors of Wuhan is an important document.

The importance of this film, though, only does it so many favors for me, and mostly I just feel bad for not finding it to be particularly engaging as a documentary. It's undeniably well-intentioned, and purely from a social point of view it's incredibly groundbreaking and important. As a film, however, it made a lot of questionable decisions that really blunted its effectiveness and impact. Throughout the film, I found myself more bored than anything else, which is absolutely the last thing I want to experience during a film about the coronavirus.

My main problems with it come with the way it's framed. There are many specific characters that the film followed, and it never really tries to get into their heads to see how they felt. It's very grounded and matter-of-fact, but perhaps too much so. The doctors were always so dressed up in hazmat suits that I could never tell who was who, and we rarely ever get any glimpses into their personal emotions on the matter - something which would have given the film much more impact. The patients are more distinguishable, and it was hard to watch their conditions deteriorate, but again, we're rarely ever truly allowed glimpses into their head and psyche, instead seeing them more as general hospital patients who are scared and confused.

The film also focuses primarily on a single hospital and the chaos it endured, but only certain scenes really spoke to the sheer chaos. As someone who doesn't work in a hospital and generally only knows a little bit about their inner workings, I was unsure what the distinction was between how it was currently operating and how it normally operated - beside the HAZMAT suits, of course. Furthermore, we rarely, if ever, get to see how civilians not in the hospital were impacted. The realities of the lockdown are rarely shown, and we don't get a good grasp of the full picture at all.

I really don't want to harp on this documentary too much because again, it's extremely well intentioned, and the fact that it exists at all is extremely important. I think perhaps it took an approach that was a little too matter-of-fact, never really letting the audience get in the heads of the doctors and patients it follows. Perhaps this film simply wasn't what I was looking for; it didn't really showcase the stories that I wanted to see, and those that were interesting were told in a rather unegaging manner.

Ultimately, though, your mileage may vary. A lot of my criticisms come less from objective flaws and more from personal expectations and tastes versus what I saw on screen. I can't deny that the film is important and sobering, and for those who enjoy a purely matter-of-fact approach to documentary filmmaking, this is probably going to be an excellent watch. For me, though, it's a film that I respect far more than I appreciate.