Foreigner’s God

Oh what a monumental waste of resources!

In Foreigner’s God, Pepper, an European/American documentarian, journeys to the village of Umuuchu in Eastern Nigeria during colonial times in an effort to do research for a documentary he’s planning on making about the god ‘Anyanwu’. He travels with his research assistant, a British Nigerian Ayke (Paul Sambo) whose father happens to have come from this same village. Upon arrival they are met by Dim (Sam Dede) the village head who abuses his power by having his way with a group of village women that he has dubbed witches because their mothers died at childbirth.

The synopsis presented above is actually a lot more cohesive than the entirety of the film. This film is a case study in confusion and missing the point. It is what happens when great ambitions and excessive funds meet a lack of direction and vision. Somewhere in here, someone planned on making quite a great movie. They hired the actors, they created the sets and they curated the costumes. However, they never quite built up the story.

In it’s simplest and purest form, Foreigner’s God is really just an old nollywood movie with an evil king and queen equivalent using the villagers however they choose fit until the gods intervene. Whilst this is a simple storyline, if done well it could have been a stellar film. Instead it loses itself in its attempt to be grander than it could manage. Somewhere in there it manages to not just confuse the audience but also itself with the accents, the languages, the sets and the plot itself.

While watching this movie it is clear that the vision was never completely fleshed out. Hence, what it becomes is a visual of multiple people’s undirected visions running amok on screen. An actor has a different understanding of the character than the director does, the writer has a different vision than the editor cuts, the music has a different plot than the scene actually depicts. No one seems to have been on set to coalesce the vision. To state it simply, though the film has a director on paper it lacks direction. So in the end what you get is a movie that does many different things without ever doing anything.

There are many glaring problems with this film but we will start with the most obvious. The graphics. If Foreigner’s God was to win an award, it would have to be for worst graphics in modern nollywood history. From the lashings to the wounds to the animals and the witches, the graphic in this is laughable at best. Then there is the language and the accents. As an Igbo person myself, it did take me a while to realize that the language spoken here (in the non-English scenes) was actually Igbo. It’s quite confounding as to why the director decided to have the language be spoken so terribly (or maybe the desired effect was ‘uniquely’) by actors who could actually speak Igbo well. There was also no consensus on the accents from character to character – would it be too much to assume that characters who lived in the same village and learned English the same way would speak similarly?

Then there are the performances. There are some Caucasian characters in this film and true to nollywood’s form not a single Caucasian here appeared capable of acting. They were there simply because their skin color matched the character requirements. Then there is Paul Sambo and to state it simply, I’m yet to see a Sambo performance that isn’t cringeworthy. It was a half hour into this film until any decent acting walked onto the screen in the person of Sam Dede. Asides Sam Dede, Toni Tones’ performance also made this movie watchable. Ini and Nancy are fair enough but could have easily been replaced with more capable actors.

There are many anachronistic elements in the film so much so that me, a non-expert in these matters, started questioning if these are the phrases that would have been used in this time or is this hairstyle appropriate for this sort of a character in this time? I guess that’s why they call it a ‘fantasy’ film huh? Foreigner’s God comes off as a well-funded children’s play. You’re going to need to utilize a lot of your imagination in order to glean any sort of entertainment from this spectacle.

P.S. Why does the poster of this film feature actors who aren’t actually in the movie?