Lost Pride

A nollywood movie (yes! Even the so called cinematic greats) have not elicited so much emotions from me in their entirety, as this movie did in the first 20 minutes. Kudos to all the viewers who were able to watch this movie from start to finish in one sitting, and also to all the viewers who watched the movie, finished the movie and simply moved on with their lives. Personally, while watching this movie, I needed to take breaks because otherwise I would currently need anti-hypertensives, anti-anxiety meds, anti-depressants and a new laptop because I would have punched a hole through mine.

Lost Pride is the story of a good christian girl, Jenny played by Belinda Effah, who after much convincing succeeds in getting permission from her mother to attend her friend’s wedding in Lagos. This friend, Tina played by Annie Idibia, turns out to have been lying about the wedding. The entire set-up is actually a ploy by Tina and Callista, played by Daniella Okeke, to get Jenny to the city so that they can destroy her life and her good girl image.

The movie brings a lot to the table. It brings a lot of topics for conversation, it provokes a lot of thought about human nature, it incites a lot of anger in the audience and this all comes around to show the talent of those who made it. There are three stand-out actors in the movie – Daniella, Mike and Belinda; however, most of the performers gave amazing renditions.

Daniella is one actress that I have had difficulty placing for a really long time. However, she was convincing, scary, annoying and simply splendid as the villain in this movie. By the end of the movie, even though her character was the only one with a near satisfying conclusion, I was hoping that someone would wrap her body in thorns and throw her down from the highest mountains. Such was the degree of the emotions that she was able to elicit via her performance.

Michael Godson also plays a negative role in this movie and he brought the action, he brought the laughter and all this while maintaining the anger within the viewer at the purely evil nature of his character. Last and definitely not least was Belinda Effah who gave a soul shattering performance as the unjustly persecuted Jenny. You feel her emotions with her and you can tell that they are genuine because of her amazing rendition.

All other performances in this movie, from Frederick to Annie to Tana to David and Anunobi were all on par and amazing. There were, however, a few actors here and there though that could not perform to save their lives.

The movie lasts for a painful runtime of 2 hours and 37 minutes. I would love to say that the time was not felt but it was beyond felt for many reasons. Especially in the beginning where Jenny is being persecuted and the viewer has so much anger that we can’t wait until justice is served. It was at times like this that you find yourself looking at the time wondering “when is this movie going to end?” The movie could have been shorter but I do not think that there are any scenes that needed to go.

Apart from the runtime, one glaring con in this movie was with Pascal Amanfo. Pascal does a cameo midpoint in this movie as one of Callista’s ex boyfriends by the name of Emeka. Then again, towards the end of the movie, Pascal returns but this time not as Emeka. He returns as the Emperor, a character completely unrelated to his earlier character and he meets Callista again and she does not recognize him. Why? Did you run out of actors?

The movie has an expected end where all the antagonists meet their doom. However, for the most part, most of this “doom” is not doom-y enough for me. The resolution needs to be equivalent to or more painful than the assault they inflicted. So forgive me if I don’t find giving one of them HIV as punishment satisfactory. It was a bit cliched that by the end of the movie it falls right back into that nollywood safe-story-space of juju and supernatural. It would be great if we could come up with natural ways of concluding our storylines without disturbing the spirit world.

Lost Pride is definitely a conversational movie and brings up a lot of valid topics from the nature of humans, the heart of man, to what is sin and what is not sin, pro-life vs. pro-choice, chastity standards for women vs. chastity standards for men, and can we call a spade a spade and call rape ‘rape’ amongst many others.