How 365 days Became one among Netflix’s Worst-Reviewed Big Hits

Two years ago, Michele Morrone was working as a gardener during a tiny northern Italian village. Newly divorced, broke and severely depressed, he had given abreast of his TV acting career after being repeatedly told that he was too attractive for the roles on offer. “In Italy, if you’re a good-looking guy, you’re not an actor,” he said matter-of-factly. “You’re just someone good-looking.”

But after five months toiling alongside cows and chickens, he got a call from his agent that a team of Polish filmmakers wanted to supply him the role of a Mafia boss within the erotic thriller “365 Days,” a neighborhood that required someone Italian and really good-looking.

“I awakened , called my gardening boss and said: ‘I’m not coming in today. My stomach doesn’t feel good,’” the 29-year-old father of two recalled. He boarded a plane to Poland and his life hasn’t been an equivalent since.

Despite a zero percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, “365 Days,” directed by Barbara Bialowas and Tomasz Mandes, quickly became a viral sensation when it arrived on Netflix worldwide on June 7, following a successful theatrical run in Poland and a limited British release earlier this year. Scripted in English with occasional subtitled Polish and Italian, the dicey plot clearly didn’t deter viewers: the Mafia boss Massimo (Morrone) kidnaps the unsuspecting Laura (the Polish newcomer Anna-Maria Sieklucka) and provides her one year to fall crazy with him before he’ll free her from his palatial lair.

Amid a growing backlash, critics say it glorifies rape culture and Stockholm syndrome. Fans say it’s been unfairly maligned. What isn’t at issue is that almost a month after its streaming debut and with seemingly no promotion, the film remains among Netflix’s Top 10 most-watched titles within the us and other countries, including Australia, Britain, Brazil, France, Spain and India.

Based on the primary during a best-selling trilogy of Polish novels by Blanka Lipinska, “365 Days” leans heavily into travel porn, wealth porn and soft-core actual porn, apparently an appealing combination within the midst of the Covid-19 crisis when many viewers are reception for months on end.

“In how , it had been almost custom-made for pandemic viewing: beautiful people having exotic sex in opulent settings,” said Caetlin Benson-Allott, an professor at Georgetown University and an expert on movie viewing habits.

There’s many (simulated) carnality to ogle within the film’s 114 minutes: breasts, buttocks, fellatio, cunnilingus, nipple tweaking, seductive ice-cream licking and more. And since Netflix defines a deem watching a mere two minutes of a title, it’s impossible to understand if a majority of viewers watched the complete movie or skipped to the more tantalizing scenes.

Teenagers on TikTok were a number of the primary to spread word of “365 Days” by filming themselves reacting to the sex scenes with a mixture of shock and admiration. “I didn’t expect this type of movie to get on Netflix; maybe, like, late-night HBO,” Noah Holifield, an 18-year-old Chicagoan whose reaction video has quite 2.6 million views, said in an interview.

Some joke that they too would really like to be kidnapped by Massimo, and his catchphrase, “Are you lost, baby girl?” (often stylized “baby gorl” to mirror Morrone’s elocution), is now a meme set to music during which the users eagerly respond, “Yes, daddy!”

“I don’t see anything problematic with the connection of Massimo and Laura aside from the very fact that he kidnapped her and planned to stay her kidnapped for 365 days,” another TikTok user, Marin Hawkins, said in an interview. Hawkins, a 19-year-old from Ohio, posted her wide-eyed reaction to the infamous shower scene (not to be confused with the infamous boat scene). “Other than that, the connection between them was good.”

And its impact extends beyond Gen Z. Audrey D’Antuono, a 44-year-old psychological state counselor from Eden, N.C., and her sister flew to Poland in February to ascertain “365 Days” during a Warsaw cinema after the trailer began surfacing on literary fan pages on Facebook.

“My husband told me i used to be crazy,” D’Antuono said. “He said it might be available to stream within subsequent few months, but I couldn’t wait. I’d never seen a trailer quite love it , and therefore the movie lived up to the hype. i feel we as a society are scared to speak about erotica or sex. It’s like this hush-hush mentality, but they’ve brought a taboo subject to the mainstream and located people love it .”

Then there’s Susana Rodriguez, 33, of Houston. She said she’d watched “365 Days” a minimum of 100 times on Netflix and doesn’t accept as true with those that condemn it. “Yes, it does romanticize Stockholm syndrome, but it’s just a movie,” she said. “Other movies have killers and other people getting killed, but they’re not protesting those movies. It’s 2020. we’d like to separate fiction from reality.”

Some of the criticism of “365 Days” echoes that of the “50 reminder Grey” trilogy, another campy book-to-movie slice of erotica featuring a wealthy, powerful man and BDSM. Benson-Allott said the outright dismissal of both franchises was the byproduct of the us being “still a really puritanical country during a lot of the way .”

“We frown upon pornography and judge people for enjoying erotic fiction,” she added.

But it’s hard to ignore that the whole premise of “365 Days” is problematic. Variety’s review blasted the film’s “two flavors of misogyny” and its suggestion “that consent are often obtained retroactively,” while the feminist website Jezebel lamented “how quickly depraved abduction turns to cookie-cutter fairy tale.”

In an letter to the Netflix chief executive, Reed Hastings, made public on July 2, the Welsh singer Duffy — who earlier this year opened about her own experience being drugged, kidnapped and raped — asked the platform to get rid of the title, writing, “This shouldn’t be anyone’s idea of entertainment, nor should it’s described intrinsically , or be commercialized during this manner.”

The streaming service wouldn’t comment for this text , while Morrone emphasized that the story was pure fantasy which he “would never encourage or want anyone to fall crazy with their captor in real world .”

But Dr. Goali Saedi Bocci, a psychotherapist and columnist for Psychology Today, warned against dismissing the problems on the idea of fiction.

“There is clearly quite little bit of misunderstanding about sexual consent and assault” in real world , Bocci said, “and such films only still muddy the waters.” The danger is that men and ladies “can be victims of sexual abuse , rape, molestation and not even recognize it intrinsically .”

“We need to be extra cautious of the media we consume because, love it or not, this stuff get into our subconscious,” she said.

Still, the film has racked up fans, as evidenced by Morrone’s Instagram account, which has skyrocketed from fewer than 200,000 followers in January to quite 7 million at the top of June. On an evening out while visiting Berlin, he was mobbed by German teenagers clamoring for selfies. It’s an unexpected turn for the son of a hard hat and housekeeper who paints, dances (he was a runner-up on the 2016 season of Italy’s “Dancing With the Stars”), plays guitar, sings and writes his own extremely personal music, sort of a song about his 2018 divorce from the Lebanese dressmaker Rouba Saadeh.

After four of his tracks were featured in “365 Days,” Universal Music Group signed him to a worldwide record deal, and he’s performing on a second album while fielding scripts from Hollywood and Europe. But first, with “365 Days” ending on a cliffhanger and two books still to travel within the series, he’ll soon reprise his career-making role during a sequel which will film when pandemic restrictions are lifted.

He teased, “The story goes to be very, very interesting.”

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