True love. Is it when your soul understands another’s or when your genitals are velcro-ed together for life? According to the poets, it’s both, but in the world of 365 Days: This Day, it’s only the sticky velcro one. The long-awaited sequel to summer 2020’s stupid horny hate watch 365 dni has finally arrived on Netflix. Where the last film ended on a deadly cliffhanger, 365 Days: This Day skips right to the happy ending. The movie opens with a groom seeing his bride in her dress before the wedding and then boning her hard al fresco. What follows is a strangely wholesome marriage ceremony that gives way to the horniest honeymoon sequence since Bridgerton Season 2.
If you like your sex scenes served with a healthy dose of absurdity and a pinch of “holy shit, are these actors actually doing it?!?”, then 365 Days: This Day delivers. From the very first scene to the utterly unbelievable climax.
365 Days: This Day is the second installment in a trilogy based on the books of Blanka Lipińska, a Polish cosmetologist who came up with her randy story while reading Fifty Shades of Grey on vacation in Italy. In the first film, 365 dni (or 365 Days), bored Polish sales rep Laura (Anna-Maria Sieklucka) goes to Italy on vacation. There she is kidnapped by “Don” Massimo (Michele Morrone), a mafia lord who has been obsessed with Laura ever since he saw her on a beach years earlier. Massimo’s plan is to hold Laura hostage for 365 days in the hopes that Stockholm Syndrome is a real thing — I’ve recently been told it’s not! — and Laura will fall in love with him. Somehow it works. They have insane sex against a backdrop of wealth, violence, and the Mediterranean Sea.
As mentioned, 365 Days: This Day starts on Massimo and Laura’s wedding day. He creeps up on his blushing (briefly blonde) bride and she whispers she’s not wearing panties. Minutes later, her best friend Olga (Magdalena Lamparska) walks in on them mid-hump, her own arms laden with wispy bits of fabric that might be that missing underwear. “You’re sick people, you know that?” she says in English before calling them pervs in Polish. Is she talking about Massimo and Laura or us? Who can say?
The wedding night is as raunchy as you’d hope from the likes of Massimo and Laura. The domineering crime lord tells his lady love she has one hour to do whatever she wants, then it’s his turn. She rebuffs this, saying she’ll take control. (The good news is the sex feels 100% more consensual this time around? Eh?) She ties him up with her stockings and proceeds to pleasure herself nude. Disclaimer: this part looked hard to fake with movie magic so I am once again praying to “sweet baby Jesus and the grown one, too” that there is a hell of an intimacy coordinator attached to this project. Finally, Laura asks her husband to take her the way she likes. He is an animal unleashed. She likes it, we are led to believe.
The next morning, Laura wakes “Husband” by revealing she’s somehow managed to have a dye job in the wee hours of the morning. (I do want to know more about how Laura gets her hair and makeup done, though, because she is never disheveled after a sex scene. Hey, author Blanka Lipińska, can you add more of your cosmetology to the story? I need to know how this is possible!) They then embark on a honeymoon supercut that is Sandals resort ad meets soft core porn.
The moment that will live with me forever isn’t when Massimo attempts to eat Laura’s face mid-kiss in a hot tub — though that will likely stay with me until about November this year — but when the two indulge in some “fore” play. While golfing, Laura begins to pole dance on one of those flag things that notes a hole. She then sits down and spreads her legs over the tin cup. Massimo licks his lips. He blows on his club. He then puts his ball straight between his wife’s legs and scores a hole. It’s a scene that only makes sense if you type it out and see all the double entendres for yourself. 365 Days: This Day is intellectually stimulating that way.
When Laura and Massimo return from vacation, they fall back into their old routine: Massimo is controlling, Laura is demanding, and the mafia families of Europe hatch wild schemes to tear these two horn dogs apart. The rest of the film is a parade of over-the-top sex scenes, Tommy Wiseau-esque dialogue, and a plot twist involving a secret evil twin.
But 365 Days: This Day starts in a moment of bliss for Massimo and Laura. It starts with the honeymoon. And then it’s all downhill (or consistently terrible) from there. I can’t wait for the third and final installment.