365 Days: Netflix’s Polish Erotic Thriller That Sells a Kidnapping as Romance

Barbara Białowąs and Tomasz Mandes adapted Blanka Lipińska’s bestseller about a Sicilian mafia heir who abducts a Polish woman and gives her a year to love him. Netflix turned the result into the most argued-about romance of 2020.

365 Days runs on a clock. A mafia heir abducts a woman and gives her one year to fall in love with him, and the whole Polish erotic thriller, known at home as 365 dni, is built around that deadline. Laura Biel (Anna-Maria Sieklucka) is a professional from Warsaw on a trip to Sicily. Massimo Torricelli (Michele Morrone) is the man who has her taken. He promises not to touch her without her consent. The film presents that promise as gallantry. Its critics saw it as the problem.

The countdown has a backstory. Massimo first glimpses Laura on a beach shortly before an attack on his family leaves his father dead, and her face becomes a fixation he carries into his new role at the head of the Torricelli organisation. Years later, Laura arrives on the island with her boyfriend Martin (Mateusz Łasowski), in a relationship already running on fumes. Massimo has her seized and brought to his villa. The rest of the story moves through captivity, defiance and seduction against the backdrop of the Sicilian coast, and it closes on a cliffhanger that leaves Laura’s fate open.

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From a Polish bestseller to a Netflix export

The film adapts the first novel in Blanka Lipińska’s trilogy, published in Poland in 2018. The books sold on a simple proposition: explicit romance with a dangerous man at the centre, and no apology for either. Lipińska’s readers knew what they were buying, and the adaptation kept the bargain intact rather than softening it for a wider audience.

That was the key production decision, and everything else followed from it. The producers cast an Italian lead, set most of the action in Sicily and mixed Polish, English and Italian dialogue. A domestic production ended up with the surface of an international one long before any streaming service was involved. The Fifty Shades of Grey comparison wrote itself, and the marketing did nothing to discourage it.

365 Days opened in Polish cinemas in February 2020, timed to the Valentine’s Day window, and found its first audience at home. Netflix added it to its catalogue that June. Within days, the film was climbing the platform’s charts far beyond Poland. Cinemas were closed across much of the world, audiences were at home, and a Polish-language romance reached viewers it could never have reached through a conventional theatrical release abroad.

The faces of Laura and Massimo

Michele Morrone came to the role with a career in Italian television, including the period drama Medici, and almost no international profile. The film changed that quickly. Morrone also works as a singer, and he recorded songs for the soundtrack. Those tracks travelled alongside the film on music platforms, which turned the lead actor into both the face and the voice of the campaign.

Anna-Maria Sieklucka was a young actress trained in theatre, with very few screen credits, when she was cast as Laura. 365 Days was her first major film. The role carried the most exposed material in the production, and it fixed her public image to a single character for years. She returned as Laura Biel in both sequels.

Around the two leads, the directors assembled a cast that mixes Polish screen veterans with newer names. Bronisław Wrocławski plays Mario, the family’s consigliere. Otar Saralidze is Domenico, Massimo’s right-hand man. Magdalena Lamparska plays Olga, Laura’s best friend, and Natasza Urbańska plays Anna, a woman from Massimo’s past. Grażyna Szapołowska, whose career reaches back to Krzysztof Kieślowski’s A Short Film About Love, appears as Laura’s mother, with Tomasz Stockinger as her father and Gianni Parisi as Massimo’s father.

Barbara Białowąs and Tomasz Mandes share the directing credit, and the pair stayed with the franchise through both sequels. Two directors on a single romance is an unusual arrangement. It fits a production whose reputation rests less on its thriller plot than on its intimate scenes, and on a source novel whose fans expected those scenes to survive the trip to the screen.

Why the backlash arrived as fast as the views

The success brought a sharp reaction. Viewers, commentators and advocacy groups objected that the film romanticises abduction and sexual coercion, casting a man who holds a woman captive as the object of her desire. In July 2020 the Welsh singer Duffy, who had spoken publicly about having been drugged, held captive and raped, wrote an open letter to Netflix chief executive Reed Hastings arguing that the film glamorised kidnapping and trafficking. The Parents Television Council asked Netflix to remove the title the same month.

Netflix kept it online. In March 2021 the film collected six Golden Raspberry nominations, including Worst Picture, a rare kind of attention for a Polish-language production. The nominations travelled through the same news cycle as the protests, and neither slowed the audience down.

The structural problem sits in the premise itself. The year-long deadline is meant to work as romantic suspense: will she fall for him before the clock runs out? But a countdown set by a captor is also a description of captivity. Lipińska’s readers had accepted that double meaning on the page. Critics argued that putting it on screen, with real actors and a global platform behind it, changed what the bargain meant.

The erotic thriller had largely disappeared from Hollywood release schedules by the 2010s, and Fifty Shades of Grey revived the romance side of the formula with the danger turned down. 365 Days pushed the other way. It put a crime boss and a kidnapping at the centre and kept the explicit material that studio releases tend to trim. That choice explains the audience it found and the anger it provoked in equal measure.

Whether the film plays as a guilty pleasure or a warning sign depends on who is watching, and the argument never reached a verdict. The ratings did. Netflix ordered two more films: 365 Days: This Day, released in April 2022, and The Next 365 Days, which followed that August. The clock in the title had run out, and the franchise kept going.

Cast

Photos: The Movie Database (TMDB)

Tags: romance, Michele Morrone, Anna-Maria Sieklucka, 365 Days, Barbara Białowąs, Tomasz Mandes

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