365 Days became one of Netflix’s worst-reviewed romantic drama

Two years ago, Michele Morrone was working as a gardener in a tiny northern Italian village. Newly divorced, broke and severely depressed, he had given up on his TV acting career after being repeatedly told that he was too attractive for the roles on offer. “In Italy, if you’re a good-looking guy, you’re not an actor,” he said matter-of-factly. “You’re just someone good-looking.

But after five months toiling alongside cows and chickens, he got a call from his agent that a team of Polish filmmakers wanted to offer him the role of a Mafia boss in the erotic thriller “365 Days,” a part that required someone Italian and very good-looking.

“I woke up, called my gardening boss and said: ‘I’m not coming in today. My stomach doesn’t feel good,’” the 29-year-old father of two recalled. He boarded a plane to Poland, and his life hasn’t been the same since.

Despite a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, “365 Days,” directed by Barbara Bialowas and Tomasz Mandes, quickly became a viral sensation when it arrived on Netflix worldwide June 7, following a successful theatrical run in Poland and a limited British release earlier this year.

Scripted in English with occasional subtitled Polish and Italian, the dicey plot clearly didn’t deter viewers: the Sicilian Mafia boss Massimo (Morrone) kidnaps the unsuspecting Laura (Polish newcomer Anna-Maria Sieklucka) and gives her one year to fall in love with him before he’ll free her from his palatial lair.

Amid a growing backlash, critics say it glorifies rape culture and Stockholm syndrome. Fans say it’s been unfairly maligned.

What isn’t in dispute is that nearly a month after its streaming debut and with seemingly no promotion, the film remains among Netflix’s Top 10 most-watched titles in the United States and other countries, including Australia, Britain, Brazil, France, Spain and India.

Based on the first in a bestselling trilogy of Polish novels by Blanka Lipinska, “365 Days” leans heavily into travel p0rn, wealth p0rn and soft-core actual p0rn, apparently an appealing combination in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis when many viewers have been at home for months on end.

“In a way, it was almost custom-made for pandemic viewing: beautiful people having exotic s.e.x in opulent settings,” said Caetlin Benson-Allott, an associate professor at Georgetown University and an expert on movie viewing habits.

There’s plenty of (simulated) carnality to ogle in the film’s 114 minutes: breasts, b#ttocks, fellatio, cunnilingus, n!pple tweaking, seductive ice-cream licking and more. And since Netflix defines a view as watching a mere two minutes of a title, it’s impossible to know if a majority of viewers watched the full movie or skipped to the more tantalizing scenes.

Teenagers on TikTok were some of the first to spread word of “365 Days” by filming themselves reacting to the s.e.x scenes with a mix of shock and admiration. “I did not expect this kind of movie to be on Netflix; maybe, like, late-night HBO,” Noah Holifield, an 18-year-old Chicagoan whose reaction video has more than 2.6 million views, said in an interview.

Some joke that they too would like to be kidnapped by Massimo, and his catchphrase, “Are you lost, baby girl?” (often stylized “baby girl” to mirror Morrone’s elocution), is now a meme set to music in which the users eagerly respond, “Yes, daddy!”

“I don’t see anything problematic with the relationship of Massimo and Laura other than the fact that he kidnapped her and planned to keep her kidnapped for 365 days,” another TikTok user, Marin Hawkins, said in an interview. Hawkins, a 19-year-old from Ohio, posted her wide-eyed reaction to the infamous shower scene (not to be confused with the infamous boat scene). “Other than that, the relationship between them was good.”

And its impact extends beyond Gen Z. Audrey D’Antuono, a 44-year-old mental health counselor from Eden, North Carolina, and her sister flew to Poland in February to see “365 Days” in a Warsaw cinema after the trailer began surfacing on literary fan pages on Facebook.

“My husband told me I was crazy,” D’Antuono said. “He said it would be available to stream within the next few months, but I couldn’t wait. I’d never seen a trailer quite like it, and the movie lived up to the hype. I think we as a society are scared to talk about erotica or s.e.x. It’s like this hush-hush mentality, but they’ve brought a taboo subject to the mainstream and found people like it.”

Some of the criticism of “365 Days” echoes that of the “50 Shades of Grey” trilogy, another campy book-to-movie slice of erotica featuring a wealthy, powerful man and BDSM. Benson-Allott said the outright dismissal of both franchises was the byproduct of the United States being “still a very puritanical country in a lot of ways.”

“We frown on pornography and judge people for enjoying erotic fiction,” she added.

But it’s hard to ignore that the entire premise of “365 Days” is problematic. Variety’s review blasted the film’s “two flavors of misogyny” and its suggestion “that consent can be obtained retroactively,” while the feminist website Jezebel lamented “how quickly depraved abduction turns to cookie-cutter fairy tale.”

In an open letter to the Netflix chief executive, Reed Hastings made public July 2, Welsh singer Duffy – who earlier this year opened up about her own experience being drugged, kidnapped and raped – asked the platform to remove the title, writing, “This should not be anyone’s idea of entertainment, nor should it be described as such, or be commercialized in this manner.”

The streaming service wouldn’t comment for this article, while Morrone emphasized that the story was pure fantasy and that he “would never encourage or want anyone to fall in love with their captor in real life.