Black Bride

I’m still here trying to understanding what the relevance of this movie’s title is… but moving on!

Black Bride is the story of a young family that consists of a workaholic wife, a family oriented man and a poor elementary school age daughter who is caught in the middle of their squabbles.

As you can probably already tell, our husband is not too happy about wife’s relationship with her job, or as he terms it, her “marriage to her job”. According to her, he is ‘impossible to please’ because apparently in some far away time (set before the movie started) she used to be a stay at home wife and he used to call her a “gold digger” because of it. And it’s at this point that you realize that this ‘husband’ of ours really has a way with words. In the entire length of the movie he finds various ways to essentially call her a failed mother by asking if she was even ready to have a child or why did she even get married? Not to mention the numerous taunts throughout the duration of the movie about how she doesn’t cook. However, I’ll spare us all the ‘feminism rant’ or the possible ‘abusive husband’ angle and ignore his numerous character flaws.

Later in the movie, at some point where it seems to the viewer like the couple is actually making progress in communication and compromising, our darling husband decides to cheat. This one – more so than many of the similar versions that we have seen – seems more like he felt like cheating, and the fact that his wife is a recovering workaholic was just a convenient excuse. But does anyone explore that? No. Instead we compound this with an immature wife who literally packs her things and leaves her home at the first sign of cheating (but…you were ok with all his verbal abuses though? Ok) alongside an opportunistic confused elementary school teacher.

This elementary school teacher was one of the more interesting characters in this movie. This is not because of anything grand but just due to the amazing level of inconsistency she managed to show. At some point I actually began to wonder if she had split personality disorder because I wasn’t even sure that she knew what she was doing most of the time. In one scene she goes from, “I can’t take your daughter after school because I have a life outside these four walls” to “Ok, your daughter can stay with me and 100k is fine”. Then in the next few scenes she goes to “I don’t need the money. I did it because I love her”. Oh really? Did you now? And na so you take love all the other pikins wey dey your class. Quick question madam teacher, is it this same “love” that’s paying your rent in that fine apartment/house that you live in? Otherwise how do you afford that on a teacher’s salary though? (Lemme mind myself).

Then there’s the matter of performances. You can argue that there were only 1.5 performers in this movie – Ruth Kadiri being the one and the actor that plays her friend being the half (simply because of scarcity of scenes).

…But don’t get me wrong. It’s not a bad movie. However, I will say this – for this one you’re going to need to leave your brain behind because he who asks the least questions, will enjoy this movie the most.