Uyoyou Adia’s Anthill-produced film, Casa De Novia, is Nollywood’s latest attempt at mixing a random genre with comedy. The film stars Taye Arimoro and Anee Icha as its leading stars. As with other Nollywood films of its nature, events proceed as expected. It is a mixture of another genre with comedy—usually slapstick comedy. This is followed by a plot that could be a better film if paid with more respect and attention. And finally, a subpar execution, forcing the film to need a deus ex machina resolution. This has been the case with previous attempts like Dead Serious, Prophetess, etc. Casa De Novia is no different. 

Yo-yo (Anee Icha), a reporter at a gossip blog, is searching for a new apartment in Lagos’s labyrinth. After a difficult process, she finds a mansion for a meagre sum of 600k. Desperate and relieved, she pays with all her savings for the apartment and moves in. She soon finds out she is living with the ghost of a man who was murdered on the night he was to propose to his fiancee and who has been missing since then.  Yo-yo proceeds to tell his story to help his soul finally find peace. 

The unpleasant surprise with Casa De Novia is that it had the plot and resources to make a comedic horror film complex enough, even for social commentary on Lagos’ insensitive house agents. It had the narrative, technical, and human resources to do so. Instead, it went down a familiar road. The film, as with many before it and many more after, uses comedy as a crutch to hold up a flimsily executed plot.

The film has an interesting premise and a predictably convoluted twist at the end, but its second act is almost bare. Who is Yo-yo other than a horny 9-5 middle-class Lagosian? We cannot sympathise with Yo-yo when her entire motivation is so linear that it could have been resolved in the first act. Her primal wants can be a problem, but they are not cast against the shadow of serious human issues. One of them being the unkind nature of house hunting and pricing in Lagos. 

The mediocrity that comedy allows continues into the other facets of production. Slapstick comedy’s acting refuses complexity because the plots are usually bare. Everyone coasts through their performances, especially the principal characters. They have to be immediately recognisable, and so must their performances. It is why we know what sort of film we are about to watch whenever we see Baba Suwe or Mr. Ibu as protagonists. Neo-Nollywood has borrowed elements of those characters and plots and imported them. But it has done nothing to refine them to modern storytelling taste. For context, Charlie Chaplin is the West’s Baba Suwe/Mr. Ibu equivalent, but while Charlie Chaplin made his silent, exaggerated slapstick works, he also had the narrative reach to make the poignant The Great Dictator (1940), a critique of the looming WWII at the time. This mergence is absent in Nollywood. 

It might seem harsh to approach film criticism as we do, asking a film to be what it isn’t. However, when filmmakers and certain studios make certain types of films because they are safe, there is an overarching problem that should be pointed out. We must remind ourselves how problematic it is to leave certain films and not remember any significant element from the film. If we all remember memorable events, dialogues, and scenes from comedy films like Scary Movie (2000), Home Alone (1990), and Baby’s Day Out (1994), then why shouldn’t we demand the same of Casa De Novia or Prophetess (2021)?

The Nigerian brand does not use comedy to highlight a certain trait. In Home Alone, it shows that despite Kevin’s resourcefulness, the love of family is absolute. And Scary Movie shows how stereotyped and predictable horror characters are and behave. Comedy, well-executed comedy, implores us to look at a normalised situation and contemplate how ridiculous it is. That few to none of our comedy films allow for this show that we have not gotten the basics right. Casa De Novia continues to prove that.

Casa De Novia premiered on Prime Video on March 29.

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Side Musings

• The practical effects are decent. 
• There was really no need for Esosa to go rage at the news company. Just drew attention to himself. 
• Nobody I know in Nigeria would pay 600k for that house under any circumstance.