365 Days arrived in Polish theaters on 7 February 2020, reached Netflix on 7 June, and six years later it is still being called one of the worst films ever made. It also became one of the most watched items on the service across multiple continents. Both things are true, and the gap between them is the whole story.
Massimo Torricelli and the Woman on the Beach
Barbara Białowąs and Tomasz Mandes directed, from a script by Tomasz Klimala, based on the first novel of a trilogy by Blanka Lipińska. The plot opens with a meeting between the Torricelli Sicilian Mafia crime family and black market dealers. Massimo Torricelli watches Laura Biel on a beach. The dealers shoot him and his father. Massimo survives. His father dies.
Five years later Massimo runs the family. Laura is in Warsaw, unhappy with her boyfriend Martin. She celebrates her birthday in Italy with Martin and is kidnapped.
At his villa Massimo tells her his story: while injured, all he could think about was her. He searched for years. He intends to keep her a prisoner for 365 days in the hope she will fall in love with him.
A Promise He Does Not Keep
He promises he will not touch her intimately without her consent. He is physically and sexually aggressive toward her anyway. That contradiction is not examined. It is the premise.
He cuffs her to the bed and makes her watch him receive oral sex from another woman. He claims he is going to rape her, then changes his mind and orders her to dress for a club. There she flirts with a man from a rival mafia family, who gropes her. Massimo draws his weapons. Laura is taken out.
The next morning she wakes on a yacht. Massimo confesses he shot the man’s hand and started a gang war. She tries to apologize. He blames her. They argue, she falls into the water, and he jumps in after her.
Anna-Maria Sieklucka and Michele Morrone
Sieklucka plays Laura. Morrone plays Don Massimo Torricelli. Around them: Bronisław Wrocławski as Mario, Otar Saralidze as Domenico, Magdalena Lamparska as Olga, Natasza Urbańska as Anna, Grażyna Szapołowska and Tomasz Stockinger as Laura’s parents, Gianni Parisi as Massimo’s father, Mateusz Łasowski as Martin.
The film runs 114 minutes. It is a romance, a drama and a crime story, and it is not really any of the three.
The 0% on Rotten Tomatoes
Critics panned it. Rotten Tomatoes logged a rare 0%. The complaints named the acting, the writing, the sex scenes and the romanticization of rape and sexual assault. Reviewers reached for Fifty Shades of Grey, released in 2015, and found 365 Days worse.
A sequel, 365 Days: This Day, followed on Netflix on 27 April 2022. It was also universally panned.
Why It Kept Winning Anyway
None of that stopped it. 365 Days became one of the most watched items in numerous territories, and held one of the longest runs as the most watched item in Netflix’s history in the United States.
It has since been referred to as one of the worst films ever made.
That is the fact that matters here, more than the 0%. A 0% measures what critics thought. A streaming chart measures what viewers chose, often late at night, often without telling anyone.
What the Film Actually Is
Strip the outrage and 365 Days is thin. The kidnapping is the meet-cute. The threat is the courtship. Read one way, Massimo’s confession on the yacht — he shot a man and started a war, and it is her fault — is the closest the film comes to admitting what it is doing. That is a reading of the scene, not something the film states.
The 7.0 out of 10 on TMDB is an audience score across 9,586 votes, not a critics’ score, and it should not be read against the 0% on Rotten Tomatoes as though the two measured the same thing. It is evidence that a large number of viewers found something the critics did not, and the film’s real subject was never love. It was captivity, sold as romance, and it worked on the people it was sold to.
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