Heaven’s Hell

One of the greatest challenges that Heaven’s Hell faces right from the door, is the task of selling a movie that was shot in 2013 to an audience in 2019. Granted, a good story transcends time, however, the platter on which that story is served will unfortunately be used to judge it. It’s not simply a problem of judging a book by its cover here; in actuality, it’s just that the quality of works have improved since then and the audience’s tastes have become more refined – much to the detriment of this film.

Heaven’s Hell starts off as the story of the friendship between two couples – the Aliu’s and the Henshaw’s. On the surface, they seem like a happy bunch with no real worries plaguing them but the harder you look, the more you realize that there’s a lot more going on than meets the eye.

The story itself and the development of which is quite intriguing. It carries you along from the first scene – despite the many questionable aspects of that opening bloody sequence – and manages to dominate your attention for most of its duration. It gets to work really quickly on establishing the characters, their relationships to each other and the back story behind each of them. We soon learn that no character here is either black or white, instead the grey abounds for all of them – except maybe Mr. Henshaw. Jeff Aliu is in his second marriage to his wife Tsola Aliu while fielding the attention of a new, hot intern at work. Edward Henshaw, on the other hand, is near retirement and constantly occupied with trying to help his wife overcome her ‘ailment’.

It’s not really until the latter parts of the film that most of the flesh is revealed. However, the story doesn’t simply drag for two-thirds of the duration while waiting for the grand end to arrive. In the meanwhile, we are peppered with the drama and tugs in the Aliu household but this drama can only hold for so long. Somewhere in the middle, the story begins to loose steam as the interest in the Aliu’s start to dull and the delay in revealing the crisis in the Henshaw’s home seems dragged. But as soon as this part of the story is revealed the film kicks back into full gear. Unfortunately, though, at this point too much time must have been wasted already because its hard to shake the feeling that the latter bits of the film are rushed and many loose ends are left untied. At the end of the film it feels like on the writing board characters like Esosa (Kalu Ikeagwu), Janet (Damilola Adegbite), and Ahmed (O.C. Ukeje) had more flesh that was cut away to meet time requirements.

Regardless, none of these commas stop the actors from bringing the heat. The strength of the performances here are one of the main factors that highlight the aged production of this film. It’s hard to shake the feeling that many raw moments in this film would have been made more glorious with the cinematographic techniques that are more common in films of this age. The cinematography here is not a complete fail, for instance the shot in the beginning where Janet walks up to Tsola to inform her that she’ll be taking away her husband was shot and choreographed beautifully, but juxtaposed against the shots in the scene where Tsola confronts her husband the day after her birthday – there’s a lot that feels inadequate here.

From Bimbo to Nse, to Chet to Fabian, to Dami and Gideon, there are powerhouses in this film that do not waste a moment to show why they earn their keep. Damilola was astute in her role as the plotting intern, such that when she goes about executing her plan you might find yourself even hailing her. In the scene where Nse breaks down and tells her truth, you are transported into the trauma that must have been her life. And when Bimbo rounds up her read on Chet’s character in that one scene you almost wish you could argue with your own significant other with such panache.

The story behind Heaven’s Hell is heartstrings tugging. The writing itself does a decent job of interlacing the stories but is almost unraveled with the hasty ending. The graphics at many points are subpar and simply unconvincing. The performances take the cake here but could have been spectacular when paired with better cinematography. The audio quality is questionable, etcetera etcetera. Despite all that, it’s still one heck of a good effort of a film.