The film opens on a wedding, and the guest list says more than the vows do. From Laura’s side, only her best friend Olga makes the trip to Italy. Massimo is a mafioso and doesn’t trust himself to hide it from Laura’s family if they come, so they stay home. The marriage starts on an omission, and Laura has one of her own. She tells Olga about the miscarriage that followed the accident at the end of the first film, then decides never to tell Massimo, afraid of the vendetta he might start. Two secrets, one pair of newlyweds. It’s the best premise 365 Days: This Day has, and directors Barbara Białowąs and Tomasz Mandes park it in the opening scenes and go looking for something louder.

The honeymoon lasts a few days. Back home, the couple find Olga and Massimo’s right-hand man Domenico (Otar Saralidze) in a compromising position, a light beat that comes as close to easy fun as the film gets. Then the marriage sags. Massimo (Michele Morrone) is busy with work, Laura (Anna-Maria Sieklucka) has nothing to do, the arguments turn daily, and her attention drifts to Nacho (Simone Susinna), the gardener. The film wants that drift to read as desire. On screen it plays as a scheduling note: the plot needs Laura out of the house, so out she goes. At a party in the house, Laura believes she sees Massimo with his ex, Anna (Natasza Urbańska), walks out, runs into Nacho, and the two leave together for an island.

Sieklucka is what holds this stretch together. She plays every turn at full volume and with a straight face, which is probably the only sane response to the material, and the more the script piles on, the more watchable that seriousness becomes. On the island Laura settles in and dreams about Nacho while Massimo, baffled, searches for her, and the story mostly treads water. Then Nacho tells her that his father runs the mafia gang rival to Massimo’s. Laura is shocked and feels betrayed, and she goes with him anyway. That “anyway” is where I stopped believing anything. The film moves her from betrayal to compliance in a single beat and never shows us what changed her mind.

The twin arrives late. Adriano, Massimo’s estranged and unstable brother, is the man Nacho’s father would rather see running the Sicilian family, and he is also the man Laura saw with Anna at the party and took for her husband. So the party, the flight and the island all rest on a case of mistaken identity that we are only told about once the damage is done. In a pulpier, faster picture that could be a real pleasure. Here it feels like a rug pulled out after the audience has spent most of the film walking across it. Morrone plays both brothers, and what the script gives him to tell them apart is little more than a label: the husband and the unstable one.

The last stretch is where the plot finally moves, and it moves fast. Laura is held by Adriano, whom she had never heard of. Massimo and Nacho, rivals all along, go in to get her. She runs and is shot by Anna and Adriano, who are then shot dead by Massimo and Nacho. Nacho leaves. Laura ends up in Massimo’s arms, her fate uncertain. The open ending had a follow-up ready, and it came quickly: The Next 365 Days arrived on 19 August 2022, less than four months after this film reached Netflix on 27 April.

Around Sieklucka, the cast has little to do. Susinna is asked to be gardener, son of a rival boss and rescuer all at once, and he still comes across as a device for moving Laura from one house to another. Magdalena Lamparska’s Olga is the loyal friend and not much more, which is a waste of the one character who knows Laura’s secret.

The film is adapted from the second novel in Blanka Lipińska’s trilogy. Shooting began in May 2021 around Italy and Poland, after a 2020 start in Sicily and Poland was pushed back by the pandemic. The delay did nothing for the script, which still lurches from one event to the next. Critics were almost unanimously hostile. One Metacritic review calls it “barely a movie,” “the emotionally bankrupt id of late capitalism, a braindead miasma of choreographed sex and nonsensical fighting.” That is a harsh line, and it lands a little wide of my own complaint, which is smaller and sadder. The opening contains an idea, a marriage held together by two things nobody can say aloud, and the film drops it for a twin, a party and a shootout. By the end we have a wounded woman in the arms of a husband we have barely seen as anything but a man who was busy.