House Husband

At this point, you can already recognize the formula. Pretty man, pretty wife, pretty house, pretty babies. It’s just going to be another new nollywood-pretty faces rich-nothing new here-fashion show of a romantic comedy. Or so I thought until Uduak Isong flipped the script.

House Husband follows the life of a couple with a well to-do husband a stay-at-home mom of a wife whom he refuses to help out with house work and refuses for her to get any help. Why you might ask? Because his mother did it just fine. All this was fine until he found himself without a job and had to stay at home while his wife brought home the paper.

At the beginning of this movie I noticed the light air of the movie (what with the play play music and the colorful scenery), but I also noticed the weight of this ‘husbands’ character. You notice what the husband does, what he says, “what do we need a maid for? You’re home all day. What are you doing anyways?”. However it is not portrayed in a manner where it is preachy and seems like the ‘sermon’ of the movie.

Initially, it just feels like the everyday behavior of a typical Igbo man (sorry, gotta pick on my Igbo men). This is all until the script is flipped and we realize what’s actually going on. The writer’s greatest success in this movie is making the point without #1 seeming too preachy and losing the “entertainment” aspect of the movie and #2 portraying the female character as a weakling whose only source of redemption is through a perchance arrangement of events.

The female lead in this film, played by Bellinda Effah, throws a real surprise at the viewers when she takes charge of her family’s future instead of sitting around and hoping and praying that things will “fix itself”.

The movie is a very active watch and easy to get engrossed in from start to finish and the lead characters do a great job bringing the characters to life. Kenneth Okolie owns this “Igbo man role” (and there I go again) and we watch him as his reality transitions alongside his mentality. Belinda Effah also does very well as the wife who decides to take control.