There’s a great canon of spy films that portray intelligence agents as cool power-players struggling against mysterious dark forces of unknown strength. Director Chris Morris’ new film The Day Shall Come, by contrast, hews a little closer to the reality of the FBI and CIA being granted massive budgets and responsibilities that are totally out of sync with the actual level of danger posed by the radical organizations they target. The Day Shall Come finds humor in that disparity, and the bumbling nature of the people trying to justify and profit from it, while also never shying away from the real human impact of such aggressive surveillance and policing.
The plot of The Day Shall Come follows Moses Al Shabaz (Marchánt Davis), a poor black Miami preacher who dreams of building a revolutionary movement capable of solving the poverty and violence he sees all around him. But, unlike the Black Panthers of decades past, Moses’ organization isn’t even close to being a potent political force. He preaches only to a handful of friends and his wife Venus (Danielle Brooks), who are mostly humoring him.
Moses does broadcast some of his speeches on Facebook Live, where he gets noticed by FBI agent Kendra Glack (Anna Kendrick). Glack’s bosses are eager to prevent “the next 9/11,” mostly to further their own careers, and Glack convinces them that Moses is her man. But since he’s not actually a threat himself, the FBI needs to set up a fake arms deal where their own double agents will pretend to be Al-Qaeda operatives selling guns to Moses. If he accepts the deal, then they’ve got him, and he presents a clear and present danger and the FBI can seem like heroes for stopping him…even though they’re the ones who made him dangerous in the first place.
The trailer for The Day Shall Come states that it’s based on “a hundred true stories,” but Morris cites the case of “the Liberty City Seven” as a particular inspiration. Back in 2006, seven young black men from Miami were accused of trying to orchestrate a “full ground war” against the U.S. government, even though their only real crime seemed to be trying to trick government informants into paying them $50,000.
“I happened to be [in Miami] for the trial, and I remember the way it was presented on the news: As some grand triumph for the FBI thwarting this terrible plot,” Morris tells EW. “But as it transpired, it was just seven construction workers trying to talk themselves up to get money being offered by an FBI informant. I met some people involved in the case, and slowly began to realize that this was a repeat activity for the FBI.”
Davis said that he drew inspiration from growing up in Philadelphia, where in 1985 police dropped a massive bomb on a residential neighborhood where members of the fringe black radical group MOVE were living. The MOVE bombing killed 11 people, including five children.
“As a kid growing up, I’d heard the story of MOVE and what happened to them back in the ‘80s. That was my jumping-off point and where my interests lay,” says Davis, who will be playing another black radical unfairly targeted by the FBI, civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael, in The Great Society on Broadway this fall. “But I did a lot of research into some of the guys [Morris] was talking about, like the Liberty City Seven. It’s crazy the way these guys go about it, where you’re guilty until proven innocent.”
At first it might seem strange that such real-life tragedies are at the center of a comedic film that finds a lot of humor in the way these bumbling FBI agents go about ruining people’s lives, but, for Morris, that blend of tones is key to making a story like this feel real.
“It comes again from the fact it originates in reality. Imagine me coming over from London, looking at the FBI and legal process and getting to the point where I’m talking to people whose immediate family has been blown apart because one of them has gone to jail on one of these trumped-up cases. You’re confronted with the sheer human impact of this,” Morris says. “The fact that it’s ridiculous along the way is part of what draws your brain. The more ridiculous it is, the more of a problem it is, because surely this couldn’t be happening? This is a film about people who get murked by the legal machine. You can’t flinch from that. A series of funny jokes with actual consequences is, for my money, the only reason to do something.”
The Day Shall Come is playing in select theaters now, and available on VOD.
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