Twelve Hours of "The Third Day"

"The Third Day" is a miniseries co-produced by HBO and Sky Atlantic, a mystery series about a cult that resides on the remote Osea Island. The series is six episodes long, divided into two parts with a special livestream event titled "Autumn" bridging the two halves.  I haven't watched any of the actual episodes of the show so far, but "Autumn" was something that immediately grabbed my attention.  It's a twelve hour long episode, done all in one shot and one take, which was filmed and streamed live over Facebook, on October 3rd.  I didn't watch the stream live, not having heard about the stunt until it was over.  However, the videos of the whole event are still available for free on Facebook for now, and I ended up sitting through some significant chunks of it, while skipping ahead through the slower bits.

And there are a lot of slower bits when you're talking about a twelve hour livestream of an epic piece of performance art.  "The Third Day," follows a character named Sam, played by Jude Law, who comes to Osea and gets caught up in the internal conflicts of the cult.  "Autumn" depicts their religious festival, Esus and the Sea, from sunup to sundown.  The first hour or two of the livestream just shows the camera slowly traveling around the island and into the Osea community, watching various people making preparations.  At one point an old man eats a sandwich.  A little later, we come across a field of what appear to be bodies, but are actually effigies filled with straw being prepared for the ceremony.  Jude Law shows up about two hours in, and then he's quickly dragged away to what looks like a recreation of the Last Supper taking place half-submerged in the ocean.  Not having the context of the previous episodes of the show, it was fun trying to puzzle out what was going on.  The audio is only so-so, and I think I only heard about thirty percent of the spoken dialogue - but you don't really need it to follow what's happening. 

Soon it becomes clear that Sam is being forced to undergo a series of trials, representing the journey of the cult's martyr figure Esus, in order to become the new leader of Osea.  This includes digging his own grave, dragging a wooden boat a long distance to the sea, and balancing on a platform over the ocean until he falls in the water from exhaustion.  It's a marathon piece of acting from Jude Law, and the dozens of other actors we see onscreen.  And I can't imagine the Herculean efforts that were going on, on the other side of the camera in order to pull this off.  I've seen films done all in one shot and one take before, but this is twelve hours of uninterrupted viewing with very few cheats.  The camera does check in on multiple characters and locations, so performers get breaks, but it also stays on certain scenes for an uncomfortably long time.  Jude Law drags that boat all the way to the shore in real time, and we see every step he takes to get there.  The amount of immersiveness and dramatic momentum achieved by the production is terrific.  

 

However, as mesmerizing and impressive as "Autumn" is, it doesn't make me want to watch the rest of "The Third Day."  Going through the synopses of the earlier episodes, this looks like a more grounded take on "The Wicker Man," with less sensationalism and violence.  I'm not particularly interested in this, even if it's only six hours of screen time compared to how many I've already spent watching people wander around Osea in the livestream event.  The viewing experiences are very different, as the regular episodes of "The Third Day" don't appear to incorporate any of the techniques or storytelling devices used in "Autumn."  And I wouldn't watch a version of "Autumn" that was edited down to fit the time constraints of the other episodes either. 

In any case, "The Third Day" pulled off a fantastic experiment in merging live theater with television drama, and creating a really unique piece of art.  I hope we see more like it.

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