August: Cinema of Africa, Asia and Oceania.
- The Duplex. (Nigeria, 2015. Dir. Ikechukwu Onyeka). Emeka has been offered a hell of a bargain: a luxurious duplex for a fairly cheap investment --the perfect place for himself, his wife Adaku and their soon-to-be-born child! Sure, they'll have to make a few sacrifices, such as selling her car and take out quite a few loans. And sure, Adaku is more than a little wary about the property. Oh, and there is the curiosity that the previous owner was apparently in a hurry to sell the house and leave the country. Still, it can't be quite so bad, right?
...Perhaps Emeka should have paid more attention to his wife's sightings of a ghostly figure that roams the house at night...
Nollywood productions, or simply Nigerian films, are a relatively new phenomena, having existed for roughly twenty years (there are quite a few disagreements on this number). As a still emerging movie industry, the offer is quite varied in terms of themes and quality. There are as many highly experimental artistic offerings as there are products intended for a more commercial venture, of which "The Duplex" is one.
One way in which studying low-budget genre productions intended for a non-centralized population is that they will often reflect those population's concerns and interests. Horror, Action, Romance and the like, intended for very specialized audiences (say, Chicano cinema in the US, Andino cinema in Peru, Ghanian English-language cinema and so on) can offer not necessarily a social critique, but a social reflection. These are movies intended to entertain a large audience while keeping certain popular concerns in mind --social and economic unrest, allusions to assorted wars and conflicts, and so on.
The reason for these notes is this: Taken at face value, a movie like "The duplex" would seem a completely unremarkable low-budget horror movie except that it's a Nigerian production (and indeed, most online reviews you'll find of this movie hold it in quite some disdain). But when you consider the specific context in which it was created, it can be more than a little interesting.
Take, for instance, the themes of gender, religion and social responsibility on display:
We have a married middle-class couple, financially and socially stable at first, but in which the husband is determined to climb up the ladder. He is convinced to buy the titular house with the argument that "you'll become a Landlord" (and given the eventual revelations of just how far some people would go to own a property like this, that's no small accomplishment). Adaku, for her part, not only plays along with her husband's plans despite her misgivings --she hides from him exactly how much money she truly has, and goes so far as to arrange for a friend to pretend that she'll loan them the rest of the money they need. Above all, they want to keep up appearances.
Then there is Adaku's pregnancy, and her impression that Emeka cares more about the child (and indeed about his position as a father, as a successful family man) than about her. She even mentions that in part they have stayed with each other because they were both thought to be sterile.
And then there is the conflict of religion and spirituality. Two attempts to reconcile a certain Christian rationality with the situation (praying to God not to "see or hear things that are not there") end in tragedy, while a more traditional ceremony unveils the house's complicated backstory.
It's this backstory that constitutes the weakest part of the movie. After presenting a successful role reversal (at first, only the woman sees the ghost and her husband dismisses her as crazy; halfway through he is the one haunted, while she has regained her autonomy and makes the decision to leave him to his devices), the third act is bogged down by unnecessary plot twists and complications. The actual ending presents an attempt to reconcile the present with the many sins of the past, but it's hard to buy the amount of coincidences necessary for the story to happen as it does.
In sort: A flawed (but not quite so flawed as so many reviewers would have you think), yet interesting curiosity.
