There is a running irony throughout Moses Inwang’s Dead Serious. The most obvious is how the title negates everything the film espouses. How a work of art can lack such self-awareness it degenerates into a melodramatic, saccharine piece, especially when the work is about such a sensitive topic. This is, without a doubt, the shallowest, most insensitive anti-suicide film I have ever seen. And there is no one to blame—not Sabinus, not the comic duo Pato and Vero (played by Lawal Nasiru Bolaji and Toyin ‘Tomama’ Albert)—other than the writer-director, Moses Inwang.

Dead Serious lacks such self-consciousness that it takes itself seriously. Moses Inwang’s (Blood Vessel) rom-com had various opportunities to turn away from its detrimental course, but it persisted, and painfully, we stayed with it. The lack of a proper philosophical spine sees us go from classicism to anti-suicide and finally to the film upturning all of that.

Johnny ( Emmanuel Ekweku aka Sabinus), a middle-class supermarket owner, falls in love with Amara (Sharon Ooja), the daughter of a driver, Mr. Kalu (Nkem Owoh). It is a mismatched attraction because we quickly discover that Mr. Kalu’s rude boss, Deremi (Deyemi Okanlawon), also has eyes for Amara. After a series of on-the-nose classicist pressures from her father, Amara settles with Johnny. As they prepare for the wedding, a truck hits her and we are led to believe that she died. Devastated, Johnny decides to take his life.

Suicide is a terribly sensitive topic, and to depict it as a running theme demands extra care and expertise. It is hard enough to portray in drama accurately, and it’s even more difficult when you try it with comedy. You have to get it right, and you have to wield the highest level of narrative competence. Moses Inwang clearly lacks that.

The trio leading this film, Sabinus, Nasiru Bolaji, and Tomama, clearly leaned towards the comedic more than the drama. And it is expected. When Bryan Cranston, a popular comic figure, was cast as the lead in Breaking Bad, a serious series about crime and the depth a dying man would go to safeguard his family, there was pushback from the creative team. The creators deliberately chose Cranston because the shock value of a comic actor in a very serious role would make the audience sit up. In Dead Serious, Sabinus came as Sabinus to depict a depressed man who has lost his lover and now wants to die.

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Every scene is an opportunity to highlight the crass, slapstick humour our protagonist is popular for; every beat is a waiting punchline accentuating creative irresponsibility. The performers are unconvincing, and even when they try, there is nothing from the material to spur them. We flounder from one pretend scene to another, one actor improvising after the next, as though we are in a torturous commedia dell’arte. Every single character in this film is a stereotyped two-dimensional eyesore. 

And this is all before we address the philosophical spine. Dead Serious wants to present itself as an anti-suicide film, but it is clear how much of an afterthought that is. We endure a series of failed slapstick suicide attempts. One of them is as incredible as Sabinu’s character, Johnny, going all the way to Sambisa forest to be killed by Boko Haram. We can take a joke if it is told properly, and when you make jokes around terrorists who continue to take human lives daily, you best not miss your punchline. In another scene, he runs headfirst towards fleeing armed robbers and they shoot at him, but somehow, he doesn’t die. (Somebody on that set that had two popular Nigerian “comedians” had to have noticed none of these was funny.) Another attempt sees him jump off a motorway bridge and land on a truck cushioned with mattresses. It is as though each scene tests the boundaries of incredulities more than the last. As if every mainstream Nigerian comedy director is trying to test the threshold of stupidity the audience can take. And Sabinus stumbles through these scenes, without poise or charisma, like a deer caught in headlights.

The philosophical disingenuity peaks in the third act. After seriously failing at killing himself with his first attempts, it finally seems like he does when he jumps from a high building into a body of water. Then we crossfade to a cemetery, and there is a corny set of “don’t kill yourself, life is beautiful” quotes. This is all well and good, and all might be forgiven if, in the next scene, Sabinus doesn’t turn up alive, and not just alive, but also with Amara, his previously very dead fiancee. The filmmaker fails to realise this negates the entirety of the film and declares its central philosophy null. It does not convince anyone dealing with suicide not to go through with it. If anything, it encourages them because here is a character who had problems that led him to suicide and, by a miraculous swing of plot stupidity, has had all his problems deus ex machina-ed away, thereby cancelling out the need for suicide in the first place. 

Dead Serious is a shallow work built around a fad comic character and incapably saddled with a heavy philosophical conflict as an afterthought. Somewhere in the middle, just after Amara apparently dies, the film had all the time in the world to redeem itself from bad to mediocre, but it decided to take a steeper route and turned out worse. It is, without any shred of doubt, the worst thing I have seen this year. 

Dead Serious premiered on February 23 on Showmax.

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Side Musings

• Very difficult to believe this is work from a mainstream director in the industry. Seems like work conceived after watching a comedy skit in a beer parlour.
• Nothing inspires pity for Johnny. Even in comedy, especially in comedy, we must feel some pity for the characters, for their naivety, and for the consequences of their naivety/stupidity, which has now made them a punchline.