The Blood Covenant

The Blood Covenant starts off with a flashback to the secondary school days of four “scholarship” boys at a fancy/expensive secondary school in Nigeria. Fast-forward to present day, and we see three out of the boys living their regular everyday below ‘fancy’ lives.

Eddy (Tobi Bakre) is a real estate agent at a company that has him tasked with selling off the most ‘unsellable’ property at the most aspirational price. Yet somehow whenever he returns to the office empty handed his boss manages to be surprised that it’s still unsold. Osiano (Shawn Faqua) has tech skills that he uses to help fraudsters rip-off unsuspecting foreigners. In exchange for his skills, he gets paid decently but uses that money to fund his drug addictions. Jite (Uzor Arukwe), the most well-to-do of the trio, is only well-to-do in words because he has inherited his wife’s (Erica Nlewedim) father’s company which he seems to be quickly running into the ground.

At a secondary school re-union, the trio come back in contact with the fourth member of their group, Obi (Alexx Ekubo). Obi takes them to his home with the promise of a fun evening, soon enough the three boys find themselves fast asleep only to be awakened in a red “Living in Bondage” style room as Obi prepares to use them as a sacrifice.

Now, obviously from the title and poster of this movie there is no surprises on what it’s about. It’s a film about blood money that tells the same story but picks up the narrative from a different point in the timeline. The most interesting part of this is watching the boys who initially start with a resolve of “never doing blood money” quickly end up becoming the same kind of villain they derided. The film teases an interesting angle with the addition of the cop, Inspector Gasarah (Ufuoma McDermott) but the character is woefully underutilized by the end and just serves to prolong the run-time of the film.

Though uninspiring, unoriginal and at many points unrealistic, The Blood Covenant manages to keep you watching based on the sheer power of the performances. Shawn Faqua really needs to get all his accolades in life and in this movie as he is superbly skilled in becoming the most rambunctious of characters while still managing to keep audiences invested and interested in that characters arc. Uzor Arukwe as well as Tobi Bakre also play well together in this trio and individually as they give their characters life that keep the audience entertained enough.

The end of this movie is dot dot dot. I have no words to explain the lack of logic that quickly culminates into an ending right before we see the closing credits. The sequence of events is very unrealistic and not very well thought out but like many nollywood movies, it appears the writer here is relying on the unspoken nollywood viewer-maker contract where there’s an understanding that the movie has to end soon so “anything wey happen now, just take am like that”. How does Adaugo’s character get so easily convinced to go along with the plot? How does her husband even agree to the final task? Are we supposed to just accept that that’s how tight of a grip ‘quick money’ has on people’s brains? Even if that’s the case, such emotion needs to be depicted better through the film for it to be accepted as such by the end.