Purgatory

It is not every day in the nollywood viewer’s life that you come across a film where the writer was willing to take a risk, where the EP was willing to go along with and fund that risk, and actors decided to invest their skills in this risk. So naturally, Purgatory is a nollywood movie in a category with not too many other contenders. Unfortunately, it is not headlining that category.

In Purgatory, Chibuzor -aka C. Money (played by Deyemi Okanlawon) passes out on his bed one day and his spirit appears in Banky’s (Mofe Duncan) apartment where he is pleading and chanting “Spirit of money, spirit of money. Help me see money”.

The initial comedy of it is blatant and obviously intentional – in that Banky is asking to ‘see money’ and ‘C-Money’ appears. However, the rest of the comedy that is rampant throughout this movie might not have been quite as intentional. This comedy can be found in the thematic confusion of the film, the performance or lack thereof of Mofe Duncan, and the cinematographic fails of this film.

After Banky ends up with C. Money, the storyline then follows in fluid flashbacks that establishes characters and creates emotional connections. This is mainly true for Panan’s (Bimbo Ademoye) character. As far as C. Money’s character goes, no matter how well Deyemi portrayed it there was always a comma about it. This could have been easily fixed with at least one early scene depicting his strength and command towards others (aka not Panan).

For a thematically unique storyline like this, it’s amazing that it is able to pull off 78 minutes of screen-time without ever feeling dragged. Honestly, asides from the problems you notice while watching the movie, the hardest part of watching this is deciding to watch it. It is a relatively original storyline with a deviant ending that never lets itself gets boring.

The true gem of this film is in the little treats placed all over by the writer. It is in the Yahoo-Yahoo boy who is definitely a scary guy but instead we are focusing on his love story. It is in the story of the ex-runs girl that focuses not on her path to redemption but on her skewed love story with her 419-husband. It is in the adaptation of the age old Kanayo O. Kanayo type cult scenes for a posh looking Mofe Duncan and many other things. There are many little fascinating nuggets about this movie that might make you pause and think ‘that’s a nice touch” or “that’s different”. So it becomes even more disappointing when you see the more obvious fails of the film.

One of the biggest and most glaring fails is the cinematography. A story like this geared at an audience like ours has little to no room for error. However the cinematography and shots in this movie had a gaping hole that seemed to get bigger as the movie went along. There would be scenes (like the kitchen scene) where Deyemi is annihilating the scary king-boss role, and Bimbo is not missing a beat in portraying the scared subordinate who quivers in fear. But then the camera not only does nothing to add to that scene instead it manages to take away from it. Or there’d be the random moments in Banky’s apartment where you are in the middle of an engaging scene and get distracted because someone suddenly decided to switch camera modes to a fish-eye. But why? Why was that necessary? You already have enough working against you. Don’t work against your own self.

Then there was Mofe Duncan. If you agree that acting involves embodying personas and convincing the people on the other side of the screen that your character is a real person living his life without screens, then you and I can both agree that what our brother Mofe is doing here has barely scratched the surface of the art. Watching him in scenes with Deyemi is like watching an adult trying to have a conversation with a snickering pre-adolescent child. Simply switching roles between Seun Kentebe and Mofe Duncan would have given this movie so much more substance.

And then there was the thematic confusion. Some movies go straight dark, and some dark with a little bit of humor. Then there are also the movies – kind of like Tatu – that pull you into a different world right from the scratch so that later on when they do something that would generally be considered weird, it would make sense in that movie. This one was different. It was hard to place what coloring scheme we were sticking with, what vibe we were going with (what with all the intentional vs unintentional humor), or what theme the film was working off of. Such that by the time we arrive at the end of the film and orphans are standing in front of an orphanage gate wearing weird hats and with hands together in prayer, you are not really sure how you got there.

To be honest, Purgatory is best thought of as an experiment. For the nollywood enthusiast it shows how far we are coming in our films and the things we still need to work on. For the everyday typical nollywood viewer…. actually, I don’t need to say anything to this group because they probably won’t make it too far into this one.