Title: DARK (Full Story)

Starring: Monalisa Chinda, Van Vicker, Rukky Sanda

Synopsis:

A grieving mother seeks revenge on a doctor that couldn’t save her daughter’s life.

Review:

The story commenced with Stacey’s daughter being rushed into surgery. During this frantic time, Stacey (Rukky Sanda) made Delphine, the doctor in charge, promise that her daughter would come out alive. Unfortunately, her daughter didn’t make it. 

While Stacey moaned the death of her daughter, Delphine (Monalisa Chinda) went on with life as normal. She lived the good life on a doctor’s salary and although her marriage to Kayode (Van Vicker) wasn’t perfect, she enjoyed raising her young son. 

Evil thoughts transpired because Stacey buried her child while Delphine still had hers. She held Delphine responsible and decided that revenge was the way to go. 

Let’s Talk. So here’s the dealio on this one. This movie is described as a thriller but honestly it was hardly unnerving. It had its highs and lows so let’s start with the positive. 

The casting. Monalisa Chinda, Van Vicker, and D’Marion Young played the victimized family and they were the highlight of the movie. They resembled each other and the dynamics between them and the marital stress was believable. I loved them! 

The story itself wasn’t bad although it was predictable. I give it credit for abandoning poverty, rituals, and characters that sleep with their best friends’ spouse which, is one of my top five complaints about African movies. 

Here’s where the movie went wayward. Rukky Sanda played the lead and she had a cockamamie take on the character. Just because a woman is grieving does that mean she has to turn into an evil killer? Maybe it’s possible but it just didn’t fly. 

Suddenly there were senseless murders and Rukky’s character was dressed in hooded capes and mixing up potions that gave the vibe of a Halloween/mad scientist movie. It’s almost as though she was channeling some other movie that didn’t quite fit the circumstances in this one. 

To tell you the truth, the lead character should have been written differently and played by someone else. Talk about getting in your own way. Tsk, tsk. The portrayal of the character didn’t work and empathy for her certainly didn’t translate. 

There were other situations that didn’t make sense. For instance, there’s a scene where Kayode (Van Vicker) was in Tracey’s home and he heard sounds coming from a locked room. How could he be so brainless as to not break into the room, especially when a member of his family had been missing for weeks? His wife even voiced suspicion about Tracey!! Come on! 

Stronger writing would have made Kayode’s motive be to find the missing person. It would have interesting to see Kayode toy with Tracey and pretend that he wanted her and then while she slept he could have broken into the mysterious room.  Hey, just an opinion. 

Performances? To reiterate I admired the performances by Van Vicker and Monalisa Chinda. I can’t say that I was moved by Rukky Sanda’s performance. 

As for technical stuff, I watched on DVD and the sound was really bad. I had to turn my television to the maximum volume and I still missed some dialogue. Video and production quality sufficed. 

Once again, Rukky Sanda has played all of the pivotal roles in movie making. She executive produced, wrote, starred, and directed. Somehow she manages to procure workable locations and some of Nollywood’s best actors.

Here she got to make out with Van Vicker and it’s funny that the sexiest scenes were with her character when it’s Monalisa that played his wife. Hmm…strategic writing? It seems so but hey, I’m not hatin’ – I wouldn’t mind locking lips with Van Vicker myself. 🙂  

You can say what you want about Rukky Sanda but as far as I’m concerned she gets it done and I will always give her props for that. Unfortunately, “Dark” didn’t see the light due to substandard storytelling. EJECT