Until 2023, Naz Onuzo, one of the three Inkblot founders, was the only one consistently behind the camera as a director at the studio. Last year, Damola Ademola made his directorial debut with a one-location getaway gone wrong in A Weekend to Forget. This year, Zulu Oyibo’s debut, The Betrayed, is another among the executives in the Inkblot household that goes the murder mystery route, adding to the list of poorly structured mystery plots that lack memorable characters, twists, misdirections, and suspense— essential elements for the whodunit world.

Tech founders and close friends, Bala (Gabriel Afolayan) and Batista (Ibrahim Suleiman), have just sealed a lucrative deal for their company. After a celebratory dinner, Batista convinces Bala to stay out for extra celebrations at their private membership-only club. The next morning, Bala wakes up in his hotel room to be confronted by a grisly sight: the escort he spent the night with is lying dead. Before he can comprehend the situation, a hotel staff quickly raises alarm, and Bala is arrested. The effects on his family are devastating, with his wife, Amarachi (Uche Montana), left to figure out how to pick up the pieces while also trying to prove her husband’s innocence. 

While this premise offers fertile ground for intrigue, drama, and thrill, there is a lack of dramatic action, and the plot takes too long to properly kick off. So, we end up with a narrative mixture of immiscible liquids, which makes for a long, boring performance. When Bala is arrested, all evidence points to him as guilty. He believes he committed the crime as well, despite having shadowy recollections of the night. The investors in his company withdraw all of his shares, leaving his wife and kids high and dry. 

The Betrayed takes a less expected and mellow choice of progression at first by showing the effects this incident has on his close family and friends, especially Amarachi. This gives the impression that the plot is going in a different direction than it ends up taking. Somewhere during the film, there is an attempt at a genre switch that does not undergo a proper sequence of events that would aid its flip from drama to thriller, which, in addition to the painfully slow pacing of the action, strips the film of the suspense it intends to project.

The plot lacks a clear sense of purpose. When examining the first and second halves of the film, it feels as though they were written by two different people with conflicting ideas of what the film should be. The first part that attempts to explore the effects of the fallout of Bala’s arrest on his family only scratches the surface; all we see is Amarachi on a job search to find a new source of income. The kids, whose experiences could have provided enough fodder for the dramatic incidents, are completely ignored, and it ends up with a lot of empty spaces of inaction between events. These spaces are filled with overly drawn-out and unnecessary scenes, and it’s impossible to stifle the yawns as we beg for something to happen. 

The second half of the film becomes handicapped by insufficient runtime to properly establish the characters’ motivations and intentions. As a result, the progression feels rushed, and the characters’ actions come across as implausible and haphazard. A revelation of new information leads Amarachi to turn into a makeshift detective to prove her husband’s innocence; while this could make for good drama, we don’t see enough motivation for her to embark on a life-risking venture when she could have just gone to the police with the plot-twisting information. 

This is more baffling because her best friend Tolu (Jemima Osunde) is a lawyer, and it had not been established in the plot that the law had failed her. The same applies to characters like Kunle (Vine Olugu), the Yahoo boy, and Mama Vee (Adunni Ade), the resident pimp of the private club, who are forcibly induced into plodding action. Consequently, acting performances mirror the confusion of the direction, with no notable performances from the cast; most appear detached from their characters and deliver dialogues out of tone with their characters and out of sync with the action. 

For a short while, The Betrayed looks like a film on its way to being a good film, especially by initially taking a less-expected approach of a family drama to explore the plot. However, without adequate guidance and a clear direction of purpose, it becomes detracted and soon devolves into a shoddy murder mystery.

The Betrayed premiered in cinemas on August 2, 2024.

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Side Musings

• What sort of lazy subtitling is “speaks Yahoo lingo”?
• Seems like they recorded Àdùnní Ade’s dialogue separately because why does it sound like her dialogue was dubbed like in Telemundo series.
• Anyone who can put two and two together already knows who the villain is; it’s like an open secret. The story would probably have had more suspense if that information had been revealed to us.
• It’s puzzling that Bala is so rich but apparently has no savings that his family could subsist on for a little while at least.
• Also, with his money and influence, how couldn’t he get a lawyer to get him out of prison on bail?
• Tolu must be a very bad lawyer. 
• The first and second halves were clearly written by different people.
• Who obeys traffic lights in the middle of the night?
• Made the film about a Yahoo boy for a moment there.
• The African magic-esque title should have betrayed it.