Rodrigo García’s Four Good Days (2020) is a film that, at first glance, might seem to belong to the familiar cinematic terrain of addiction dramas. Yet García, true to his lifelong sensibility as a storyteller of quiet emotional earthquakes, transforms this apparently simple narrative into an intimate psychological study of love, endurance, and the almost unbearable fragility of hope. The film, co-written by García and Eli Saslow (based on Saslow’s Washington Post article “How’s Amanda? A Story of Truth, Lies and an American Addiction”), stars Mila Kunis as Molly, a woman fighting to escape the destructive gravitational pull of heroin, and Glenn Close as Deb, her exhausted mother who has lived through too many cycles of relapse and redemption to still believe in miracles—and yet, cannot stop loving.
What García achieves here is something that transcends the “issue film” label. His direction is stripped of sentimentality or melodrama. There are no frantic editing rhythms, no manipulative music cues urging us to feel. Instead, he creates a space where emotion arises from stillness—from the silences that fall between mother and daughter, from the habitual gestures of care and suspicion, from the worn furniture of a home that has seen too much grief. García trusts his audience to feel rather than to be told what to feel, and that trust is what gives the film its rare, authentic power.
The story begins in the middle of a nightmare that has become routine. Molly, skeletal and trembling, arrives unannounced at her mother’s door, asking for another chance. Deb, after years of broken promises, locks the door. The gesture is not cruelty but self-defense. Yet as the scene unfolds, something raw and unspoken passes between them: the memory of what they once were and the smallest ember of hope that maybe, this time, things could be different. Deb reluctantly agrees to drive her daughter to a detox center. From that point forward, the film becomes a four-day countdown—Molly must remain clean for four days before she can receive a potentially life-saving injection that blocks opioid receptors. Four days: an eternity compressed into a few fragile heartbeats.
This structure—simple yet unbearably tense—gives Four Good Days its quiet suspense. Every hour feels precarious. Every conversation could collapse under the weight of mistrust. García frames the passing of time not as a narrative device but as a moral and emotional crucible. In his hands, time itself becomes the antagonist—the slow ticking of days that both mother and daughter must survive without surrendering to despair. The camera never rushes; it lingers, often holding both women in the same frame even when they seem emotionally miles apart. These static, patient compositions recall García’s earlier works like Nine Lives (2005) and Mother and Child (2009), where he used similar visual austerity to explore the emotional architecture of family ties.
Mila Kunis’s performance is a revelation. Known mostly for her work in comedy or stylized drama, Kunis strips away every trace of glamour to inhabit a character who is at once defiant and broken. Her physical transformation—the hollowed cheeks, the trembling hands, the nervous laughter masking shame—is startling, but it is her emotional nakedness that astonishes. Kunis captures the mercurial mix of charm and desperation that defines addiction: the way addicts can weaponize vulnerability, the way they oscillate between self-loathing and fierce will to survive. In one scene, she lies on the couch, half asleep, muttering half-truths and small lies, and we see the unbearable contradiction of a human being who wants to live yet cannot stop walking toward death. Kunis never begs for sympathy; she simply embodies truth.
Glenn Close, one of the most disciplined and emotionally intelligent actors of her generation, gives a performance of immense subtlety. As Deb, she is not the stereotypical “long-suffering mother” of melodrama; she is pragmatic, often angry, sometimes even cold. Close lets us see the exhaustion in her posture, the way her voice flattens when she has repeated the same line too many times. Yet beneath that fatigue, there is a pulse of tenderness that refuses to die. Her Deb is a portrait of love as endurance—a love that has been stripped of illusions yet still chooses to show up. In her hands, motherhood becomes not an ideal but a relentless act of presence. Watching Close react to Kunis’s smallest gestures—her wary eyes, her cautious hope—feels like watching a symphony of restraint.
The dynamic between these two women forms the core of the film. García, son of Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, has inherited not his father’s magical realism but his gift for excavating the mysteries of ordinary life. His cinema is interested not in spectacle but in the moral texture of intimacy. Like Mother and Child or Albert Nobbs, Four Good Days finds its power in the delicate choreography between silence and speech. García’s dialogue is natural, sometimes painfully mundane. Deb and Molly argue about toothpaste, about cell phones, about trust. But beneath each mundane exchange lies the full weight of their history—a history we never need to see in flashbacks because it is etched on their faces.
One of the film’s quiet triumphs is how it treats addiction not as moral failure but as an illness embedded in love, class, and memory. García refuses to romanticize or vilify. The film’s compassion extends to every side of the experience—the addict who cannot forgive herself, the parent torn between enabling and abandoning, the community numbed by repetition. This is not the sensational world of overdoses and interventions, but the quieter, more tragic space of everyday survival. In that sense, Four Good Days joins films like The Lost Weekend and Clean and Sober in portraying addiction as a deeply human battle, yet it feels more contemporary, more stripped of the old moral postures. It understands how addiction corrodes identity but also how the fight for recovery can restore dignity.
Visually, García works with cinematographer Igor Jadue-Lillo to create a palette that mirrors the film’s emotional state. The colors are desaturated, the light almost apologetic. There is a sense of realism bordering on documentary, yet every frame is carefully composed. Interiors are cramped and airless, suggesting both safety and suffocation. The outside world—sunlight, parking lots, highways—feels harsh, indifferent. This visual restraint intensifies the emotional honesty of the story. It’s as if the world itself is watching these women without offering judgment or comfort. The camera doesn’t intrude; it bears witness.
The score by Edward Shearmur is equally understated. Instead of swelling strings or mournful pianos, we get subtle motifs—gentle pulses of sound that echo the rhythm of waiting. Music enters not to manipulate emotion but to fill the silence that grief leaves behind. In one of the film’s most affecting scenes, Deb drives Molly to a clinic while Shearmur’s minimal notes trace their tension like a heartbeat. There’s nothing overtly dramatic, yet the emotional pressure is immense. García knows that the real drama lies not in action but in restraint.
One of the film’s great achievements is its refusal to offer neat resolutions. Four Good Days is about a four-day promise, but García understands that recovery cannot be measured in days. The ending is open—not in a coy, ambiguous way, but in an honest acknowledgment that healing is never final. Even in its final moments, when we see a glimmer of reconciliation, the viewer feels both relief and fear. The film doesn’t let us escape the reality that every victory is provisional, every hope fragile. That realism is what makes it profoundly moving.
Thematically, García continues his lifelong exploration of parent-child relationships and the quiet heroism of emotional labor. From Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her (2000) to Mother and Child (2009), his cinema has returned again and again to the question of what binds people when everything else has failed. In Four Good Days, the answer is both simple and excruciating: love. Not the sentimental love of greeting cards, but the kind that survives disappointment, anger, and loss of faith. The film shows how love can both destroy and redeem, how it can turn into obsession, and how, in the end, it remains the only thread connecting us to our humanity.
There are small, beautifully observed moments throughout the film that reveal García’s sensitivity as a storyteller. When Deb hides her purse before Molly enters the house, it’s not just fear—it’s ritual. When Molly brushes her teeth for the first time after detox, the camera holds her reflection as if witnessing rebirth. When Deb listens to her daughter’s shaky laughter at the dinner table, Close lets a tiny smile flicker, quickly swallowed by dread. These gestures do more than any dialogue could. They remind us that redemption, like relapse, happens in micro-moments.
García also allows humor to emerge organically from pain. The banter between mother and daughter, the absurdity of their shared routines, the way they sometimes laugh at the very thing that could destroy them—these touches of humor prevent the film from collapsing under its own sorrow. They make the characters feel real, not constructed for empathy. Even at its darkest, Four Good Days never loses sight of the absurd comedy of endurance—the way people cling to jokes as life rafts.
One cannot overlook the film’s social context. Released in 2020, amid America’s ongoing opioid crisis, Four Good Days addresses a national tragedy through a personal lens. García never preaches or politicizes; he trusts that empathy will speak louder than statistics. By focusing on a single relationship, he reveals the epidemic’s human face—the mothers waiting at rehab doors, the children trying to forgive. The film’s title itself is almost ironic: four days of sobriety sound small in a world addicted to instant success stories, yet García treats those days as sacred. In their modesty lies their grandeur.
The screenplay, adapted with Eli Saslow, is meticulously balanced between realism and lyricism. Saslow’s journalistic precision grounds the dialogue in authenticity, while García’s emotional intelligence infuses it with poetry. Together, they create a language that feels lived-in but resonant, never overwritten. The conversations between Deb and Molly often begin in everyday chatter and slowly unfold into confession, accusation, or plea. García’s gift is knowing when to let silence complete the sentence.
As with much of García’s work, Four Good Days also bears the trace of his father’s influence—not in style but in spirit. Gabriel García Márquez often wrote about the endurance of love amid decay, about the persistence of memory, about human beings condemned to repeat the past yet seeking grace. Rodrigo García translates those themes from the realm of the mythic to the painfully real. His characters are not heroes; they are ordinary people trapped in moral paradoxes. Like Márquez’s protagonists, they are both cursed and blessed by love.
The film’s emotional climax arrives not in a loud confrontation but in a quiet moment of recognition. Molly, after a grueling struggle, sits beside her mother, both of them aware that trust has to be earned again and again. Deb’s face softens, not because she believes everything will be fine, but because she has decided that love, even wounded, is still worth giving. That, ultimately, is the miracle García captures: not transformation, but persistence. The courage to keep trying even when hope feels naïve.
Four Good Days also stands out for the equality it grants to both characters. Too often, stories about addiction reduce mothers to martyrs or villains. García avoids that binary. Deb’s skepticism is as valid as Molly’s yearning. The film never asks us to choose sides; it asks us to understand that love can coexist with boundaries, that compassion can include self-protection. That moral complexity is what makes the film resonate beyond its immediate subject. It’s not only about addiction—it’s about any relationship tested by betrayal and fatigue.
The supporting characters—Stephen Root as Deb’s husband, Sam Hennings as Molly’s estranged father—are drawn with quiet precision. They provide glimpses of the collateral damage addiction inflicts on families, but García wisely keeps the focus on the central duo. Every frame returns to their uneasy dance between distance and closeness, between past wounds and future possibilities. The film’s title might suggest a countdown, but emotionally it feels like an expansion: a widening of empathy, a stretching of time so we can witness healing in real tempo.
Technically, the film is immaculate in its simplicity. The editing by Tyler Nelson respects duration; scenes breathe. The sound design is restrained, letting ambient noise—cars passing, doors creaking, clocks ticking—serve as emotional punctuation. García’s mastery lies in creating tension from stillness. He understands that the most dramatic thing in life is waiting: waiting for the phone to ring, for trust to return, for the next mistake not to happen.
When the end credits roll, what lingers is not despair but a strange calm. García offers neither redemption nor condemnation, only recognition. We recognize these people; we might be them. The film leaves us with an image not of triumph but of continuity: the simple act of a mother and daughter still trying. In a world saturated with cynicism, that act feels almost radical.
In sum, Four Good Days reaffirms Rodrigo García’s place as one of contemporary cinema’s quiet humanists. Like his earlier works, it’s a film of whispers rather than shouts, of gestures rather than speeches. But within that quiet lies an emotional force that accumulates like gravity. García proves once again that cinema need not be loud to be powerful, that the smallest moments—an apology, a shared breakfast, a four-day truce—can contain the whole of human experience.
At a time when so many films chase attention through spectacle, Four Good Days dares to slow down, to observe, to feel. It honors the unsung heroes of everyday life: those who keep showing up for the people they love, even when the world tells them to give up. And perhaps that is why the film stays with you long after it ends. Because somewhere in its silences, we hear our own stories—the ones about forgiveness, endurance, and the stubborn hope that tomorrow, against all odds, might still be one of the good days.
