Film Mischief: There’s a scene in Behind the Smile towards its end where the colour palette of one of the main characters is imposed on the second character in a clumsy bait and switch move to reflect their true emotional states. It’s one of the countless amateur moves in the film that coalesce to form thirteen minutes of plotless meandering, the film equivalent of “you don’t know what people are going through” and other empty anti-depression platitudes.
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An expression by Hassan Tha Kreator (directly quoting the credits), the short film tells the shared tale of depression that Damola and Ada are experiencing and their singular interaction. It plays out like a mental health public service announcement at best and a superficial understanding of depression at worst. Hassan takes an amorphous concept and strips it off any complexity, the story never settles into any humanness and the people we’re supposed to relate to or empathise with are hollow projections of incomplete ideas. It’s like he had glanced through a couple of pamphlets and started making the film immediately.
Bobby Ogbolu (Christmas in Lagos) plays Damola, opening the film in a black and white scene where he’s lying on a messy bed, he receives a call from his job where the person on the other side complains about his continued absence while his face shows a deep disinterest till the call ends. He’s depressed, we can tell.
The film then moves to a brightly coloured Ada played by Sunshine Rosman (To Kill a Monkey) and we are taken through an uneventful montage of her day, starting with her morning selfie—she’s an influencer—and ending with her dressing up for a night out. Constantly skimming the surface in character and story, the characters are never real and their experiences—if they even have any—are hollow.
The film, not concerning itself with any depth of any sort, does no work infusing any sort of uniqueness into these characters, they are cookie-cutter samples you might find as examples in the pamphlets mentioned earlier. Its sole concern is racing towards an unearned and unintended hilarious twist at the end. Consequently, this struggle to find any solid ground translates to the acting where they have nothing to hold on to, so the two actors put out forgettable performances with no highlights.
There’s no crime in simple stories but there’s a crime in simplistic storytelling. The film’s aesthetic twist is detached from any narrative payoff, its messaging bludgeoned repeatedly with a closing write-up dealing the final blow— “not every smile means happiness”, you don’t say.
Behind The Smile screened at The Annual Film Mischief 2025.
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Side Musings
- When Ada books a ride to go out she sees 900 naira for her ride and I would like to know what app that is because it’s basically impossible to find a ride that cheap now.
- This film needed to do a lot more work to convince us that Shine Rosman’s character had body image issues.
