For a film to fulfill a purpose of sorts, it must have a soul—a certain essence that brews as images move, the thing that makes you feel. Whether you like the film or not regardless of runtime, you go away debating something. In eleven minutes, Daniel David’s Chapter EX, Mavin Records’ foray into film, fails to capture whatever soul it planned to have.
Following a young couple, Eve (Tomi Ojo) and CJ (Deji Osikoya), their surprise pregnancy and a failed double twist, Chapter Ex is often inert in many elements. It tells the story of a woman trying to convince her boyfriend to leave his life of crime and the plans she concocts to ensure that.
The story is sparse, barging to the twist with an excitement that ignores character development; the acting is adequate at best and falters when it matters, and the film stares at you blankly refusing to interrogate any internalities.
Occurring mostly in one location and sectioned into five chapters that if removed take nothing away from the pacing, the film`s one moment of evenness is when Eve and CJ are on different calls in the middle of their date: Eve talking to her mother and CJ talking to the threatening Billions, one of his criminal friends. In this small moment, the story deftly moves forward with these dual phone conversations but that is quickly cut off in service of the ending.
Transforming into a tale of revenge in the end, Chapter EX does not use its time well enough to justify this payoff—you’re immediately thrown off by the naivety of Eve’s plan for her fiancé—so it stumbles on its landing.
A short film can get away with a lot of things as a result of its length but there’s also a skill refined by repetition that uses inference, dialogue and acting to paint the larger picture of which a short film is a part. Captain EX is too focused on stunning you with its ending and forgets to make us invest in some way in the rest of the film.
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