Living With A Ghost

With a title like that and the side note that the movie is “based on a true life story”, it quite difficult to resist hitting play. But then you hit play and the first 2 or 3 scenes cause you to begin to reconsider. The good news is that even though living with a ghost doesn’t hit the ground running, it doesn’t take longer than 5-10 minutes after the opening credits for the story to actually begin.

“Living With a Ghost” is the story of a girl who meets and falls in love with a man. She begins to date this man and seven years down the line they are married and have a daughter. Only for her to then meet an old school friend of hers who claims that her husband is her friend’s dead husband.

It starts off intriguing and exciting. It doesn’t initially elicit any of those “juju” and “voodoo” vibes so you might actually find yourself attempting to rationalize the occurrences in this movie. It is that sort of movie. Even though the events are paranormal it holds the audience in the realm of the natural so you can continue to wonder.

This was all during the first three quarters though. Somewhere after the revelation and in the final quarter of this movie, the storyline starts to tumble and fall. Now, knowing that this movie is based on a real life story, it is hard to make this critique but it is the reality. It went from a potentially intriguing storyline and fell into yet another Nollywood juju movie that resolves via demonic influences, familiar spirits and a pastor with a bottle of anointing oil.

The problem is not with the inclusion of faith or the resolution through religion. Instead, the problem is that the development of the story initially seemed more thought out and well constructed while the finale seemed thrown together. The end seemed like a massive cop-out, not as bad as the “it was only just a dream” but bad because it could have been better.

The lead roles in this movie were played by Mike Ezuruonye and Oge Okoye. And while Ezuruonye was effortless in his charm and performance, Okoye had many moments that came off feeling very fake. These moments were mostly in her speaking parts but otherwise, it was a good performance. Uche Ogbodo also gave a fair enough performance even though I could not rationalize that purple lipstick.

The extras in the movie were not as strong but one main downfall is that the production quality could have been all-around better than the final presentation.