The Duplex

A lot of people wanted to see this movie… I didn’t. Not because I didn’t have faith in it or expected it to be terrible but simply because the combination of myself and a scary movie is as perfect as the combination of wood and termites. It is not a symbiotic relationship.

The Duplex is a story that follows a couple made up of one overly ambitious man, played by Mike Ezuruonye, and one very pregnant wife, played by Omoni Oboli. This couple prematurely moves into a home that is selling for a too-good-to-be-true price, and a few months after their move the wife claims to be seeing things. The story follows the sequence of events that occur with this couple and the ghosts in their new duplex.

Much to my delight, once the movie did start it was not even that scary. The initial scare came at the first appearance of what I will now refer to as ‘the creature’. But after that, it was not scary anymore. In fact, it was almost comical. It was quite amusing when only one person could see this creature and the other party was certain that his wife had gone certified kolomental.

One of the biggest things with scary movies is the ‘how’ or the ‘why’, actually mostly just the ‘how’. How is this third-space creature existing in our space? How is the writer going to rationalize it? And is this rationalization believable, is it original, or does it just feel like a waste of space?

Even though the duplex is billed as a scary movie, the moments after the cause of the appearances are revealed it feels less like a horror movie and more like yet another nollywood movie where the characters make really really poor decisions. In fact, at many points of the movie it doesn’t feel at all like a scary movie and this is coming from the biggest scaredy-cat you’ll ever meet. So if you are holding out on this because of the fear factor then fret not. Really! there is nothing to fret about in this movie.

As yet another movie, the story is entertaining enough. The initial scenes where the creature was appearing to the wife but doing nothing was dancing on that delicate line of becoming a bit too drawn out before it finally ended. The movie starts at a good pace, has some slow parts in the middle and then ends.

Mike Ezuruonye and Omoni Oboli did really well carrying the movie as the leads and the support from Anthony Monjaro and Uru Eke was also immaculate.

Performance wise the movie had a strong cast. Story wise it is an alright storyline. Picture quality wise, it was nearly immaculate. Graphics wise though, there were many blood splatter scenes that literally had me laughing. I mean hand to abdomen, head thrown back, Onitsha market woman laughing. The storyline was not unoriginal but it was still not the most original thing ever.