I had the unique opportunity to watch a movie called “What Happened to Monday” with my fellow Rose Scholars, and the movie left me both horrified and fascinated by the events that unfolded.

I went into the movie “blind”, so I did not know much about the movie beyond the basic plot of seven identical sisters playing out their lives as the same person when in the outside world when suddenly one day, one of the sisters disappears. While a warning was given before the movie about it containing scenes with violence, I was unaware of the amount of violence involving blood and death. I usually do not watch movies containing graphic violence, so in this aspect I did not enjoy the film and had to look away from the screen at times during fight scenes.

Despite the amount of violence within the movie, the premise itself is interesting. In the film, over-population has led to the idea of a law involving each family only having one child and any additional children being put to sleep in order for them to “wake up to a better future”. This is why the seven sisters all pretend to be a single person: if not for their acting and coordination where each sister goes outside of their shared apartment on the day matching their name (for example, “Monday” going outside only on Mondays), six of the sisters would have already been taken in by the government and put to sleep. While I will not spoil the ending for anyone interested in viewing the film, it is interesting to note the detail placed on elements such as how the law was advertised to the public as a positive solution to the over-population crisis. The writers of the film made the solution of only having one child seem like a such a logical answer to the situation that it could possibly be considered as a real-life solution should over-population start to become an issue in the real world outside of the movie.

In the case of “What Happened to Monday”, the seven sisters were so afraid of being put to sleep by the government that they formulated their entire lives around being the same person when outside in the “real world”. While I am not sure how often I would re-watch “What Happened to Monday”, I do recommend it to others and ask that they think while watching the film about how people in positions of “power”, such as the government, affect how we operate in our everyday lives in real life.