A Time to Heal

In the movie, “A Time to Heal”, a rich guy falls for a poor girl, he chases her and gets her to fall in love with him. The only thing here is the parents are not the problem. By this I don’t mean that nollywood has finally discovered ‘internal conflict’ in the romance genre… we never reach apparently… however, we’ve discovered that rich parents and rich mother-in-laws aren’t always the problem.

Demola, played by the ever dashing Michael Godson, meets and falls in love with Nkechi, a waitress played by Sophie Alakija. Our waitress is broke, our waitress is from a poor family, our waitress in school but at the same time supporting her younger brother but yet our waitress is always decked, our waitress’ makeup is forever on fleekest, our waitress has some bomb dresses that she wears… it’s an interesting kind of poverty actually.

On the one hand we have Mike Godson giving us intense stares-into-your-soul type vibe and on the other hand we have Sophie. We are grateful to God that Sophie is one rare light-skinned actor with some semblance of acting skills. She is not at greatness yet but she is also not reciting lines – for which we are thankful.

The star of “A Time to Heal” is the writer. From the start you can tell, especially thanks to this director who seems to be on the same wavelength as the writer, that the story must have been amazing on paper. With most nollywood movies that we see, it appears as if 50% of the story has been lost in translation but here it seems like only about 2-3% was lost. Some of that was lost in our stunning female lead who is not ready or able to carry it or display the amount of emotions that would have been necessary to take it to the next level.

For romances, there’s hardly ever anything new and the writing (especially of the dialogues) has a huge impact on how the movie can be graded. Here we thank God for dialogues that weren’t elementary (see our memorable quotes above), but the dialogues in this movie were also not scholarly either.

It’s a fine place in between, where this movie is placed due to the writing, and it manages to soar higher than that with the beautiful cinematography and intense score.

The conflict in this movie is the main source of originality. The greatest joy for me (in this already quite joyous movie) was getting to the end and realizing that the conflict wasn’t from class or tribe but instead from something concrete. The chemistry between Mike and Sophie fared well enough to take us to the end and will elicit a fair enough amount of ‘awws’ and ‘oohs’.