Devil In The Detail
Adjetey Anang, Nse Ikpe-Etim, Ecow Smith-Asante
A suspicious affair ruins an almost perfect marriage as husband and wife take a wild goose chase into the world of sex, lies and betrayal, risking everything in one of the craziest love triangles ever.
Shirley Frimpong-Manso
Ken Attoh, Shirley Frimpong-Manso
Shirley Frimpong-Manso
2014
It's a well constructed storyline. Very firm. Very solid.
...however, it's not very interesting.
Maybe we as an audience – or the majority of us – are really cliched and not very forward minded. Maybe we like the same kind of entertainment. Maybe some works are too forward thinking for us. Maybe we are pulling the industry back with our absolute lack of intellectual cognizance but maybe, just maybe, this movie was slow and unable to hold some of our attention… I don’t know, you decide.
Devil in the details is a story about a couple where the husband suspects his wife of having an affair. It turns out that things weren’t exactly what he imagined in the end but by then he had already done some damage. The synopsis says, and I quote, “one of the craziest love triangles ever…”. Eh…, not really. crazily boring maybe, crazily ‘un-new’ probably but not what I think of when I hear ‘craziest love triangles’. It seems quite ‘bleh’ in retrospect.
The movie itself is not at fault technically but it’s holding the interest of most viewers that I doubt. And maybe, yes, we are too used to the Aki-and-pawpaw cinema that anything slow might turn us off. It’s the same reason many didn’t like “Journey to Self“, however, the saving grace of that movie was the emotional appeal. In contrast this movie doesn’t really have much of an “appeal/engaging” saving grace. There’s a possibility that the movie didn’t click with me because I am unmarried and maybe do not fully grasp the implications of what’s happening on screen; but from my perspective after a while the movie just became sneak-sex-regret-sneak-sex-regret, a cyclical loop I was tired of after the third go.
Shirley Frimpong uses a lot of silence in her movies. Sometimes, they make the movie seem stretched. Some times, you just need to wait it out and other times it’s a hint that you should pay attention to the details. In this movie it was a little bit of all but just not enough for me to be interested.
The one amazing aspect of this movie for me was definitely the two amazing lead performance. There is magic in subtlety and there is charm and meaning beneath every wink and behind every smile. Nse and Adjetey are two actors who are very underrated – together they are simply magic.
The idea behind Devil in the Detail might have been grand but the work that we, the audience, were presented with didn’t have enough meat to hold the attention of most and does begin to drag sooner than I’d like.
Citation
Sin City
a very wonderful movie.please I need the song used in this movie and the artist name thank you
i watched the movie and 20 mins into it, i knew that the wife was cheating or had cheated on her husband. it was all too easy because she was portrayed as this pure, smart and trusting woman and for a movie trying to achieve the thriller appeal, it wasn’t hard to guess the twist waiting at the end of the movie.
I’ll give it a 6 just because i wasn’t surprised at the end.
I would pay a million bucks to see a nude Nse….I heard she was unclad in this movie…can someone categorically confirm that?
She was not nude – there is a bathtub scene with lots of water and bubbles 🙂
“A suspicious affair ruins an almost perfect marriage as husband and wife take a wild goose chase into the world of sex, lies and betrayal, risking everything in one of the craziest love triangles ever.” — This was absolutely NOT the plot. Perhaps this pitch was to get people in the theatre to watch it. However, the plot was centered around Ben’s affair with Claudia, and the surprise we encounter at the end. Yes, the movie was emotionally appealing if you truly study the way the two main characters feed off of each other, yes the acting was very good, as I absolutely love Adjetey, Nse, as well as Ecko Asante Smith, but the movie was, especially in the beginning, very slow moving in my opinion. What I was trying to understand was the motivation for continuing this affair with the PA, and what kind of relationship had been establishes between them before, as after a while, the scenes with their time spent together because of sex became a bit mundane after a while. Especially after accusing her of poisoning Helen and beating her. It would have been much more interesting to have been lead into the secret life of Helen, or at least, as the movie suggests, given scenes that would cause the audience to question all that was going on between her and Sam somewhere in the middle. I also think that what is revealed in the end is almost like preparing us to want more. Although I truly appreciate Shirley’s work, especially “Adams Apples”, I think her movies may need further development.
it was an ok film. Not original at all. I don’t think Shirley can be original. Everything she does is copied. Some of the plot lines were also not believable. The PA did not do enough to convince me that she can carry a film. is she just a sex freak who needs to sex her boss? is she in love with him? who is she?
The lead man remained one note throughout the film. what was his deal? you suspect your wife, she’s not cheating, what keeps you cheating? the characters were not well developed. Did we establish a relationship between the PA and his wife? why should they go and eat for the PA to poison her? I think they just needed a reason for the man to abuse the PA.
nice film but not very well developed characters.
The wife’s PA was friends with her husband’s PA – this is how the wife ends up eating the food (through her PA).
where did you watch it?
Sparrowstation.com