DARK OCTOBER

DARK OCTOBER OPENS UP OLD WOUNDS.

Nothing thrills about the new movie “Dark October” than the great work put into filming and telling the story of one of the very darkest moments brought to Nigeria by the evils of Jungle justice. The movie which is based on the unpleasant occurence of 2012 where four boys who were students of the University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria naively went on a mission to recover a sum of money owed to one of them by another student, incidents that followed the encounter led to a barbaric and gruesome murder of the four boys after they were accused of being armed robbers, an incident which left Nigeria and the entire world in a rude shock.

The movie starts by introducing us to the general lifestyle of the “Gen Z”, the generation taken to be ‘woke’ and almost like every Gen Z youth, they are in intense love with the world of entertainment and most often times grudgingly pay attention to their academics. The drama in the movie begins when one of the four boys in a bid to raise money for their studio session strategizes on a plan to ambush his debtor at home in the early hours of the morning,things don’t go well and they are accused of being armed robbers in a community that has suffered greatly in the hands of armed robbers, leaving them with zero tolerance towards armed robbers, this leads them into taking laws into their hands in a very gruesome manner.

One beautiful thing I must say I love about this movie is the careful work put into telling the story, the movie helps to understand the real circumstances that surrounded the sad event. Watching the movie, you could see from different angles events that led to the sad occurrence, it was enlightening yet never enough to take away the sad and unpleasant memories brought by this tragedy.

Haven suffered huge backlash on decision to release this, Linda Ikeji defied all odds in a bid to tell this story, and we honestly must applaud her for this. She unarguably has made a memorable production debut on the movie scene with this.

The production of this movie felt accurate in a way, as less filters were used, the haggard and desolate state of the average public Nigerian University was portrayed, not also forgetting the neighbouring communities of some of these Universities, as we are left to see how some Nigerians are made to live in unhealthy environments.

Dark October is not an enjoyable movie, instead, it opens up old wounds especially if you watched the traumatizing ALUU videos back in 2012. Though, it started off really slow and then became boring at some point and dragged on till the last few scenes when the boys were gruesomely murdered, but nothing beats the fact it tells the story with details properly taken note of.

The movie however would score high in the casting, we are introduced to newcomers on the acting stage, and they didn’t do bad at all, the striking resemblance of the cast with the real life victims shows enough attention the Producer gave into making this accurately filmed.

The movie has a host of newcomers on the movie scene, which are Chuks Joseph, Munachi Okpara, Kem-Ajieh Ikechukwu, Kelechukwu Oriaku and a few others. The movie was produced by Linda Ikeji and directed by Toka McBaror. 

The movie was an overall okay watch, though the ending part came disturbing, but that was understandable. The movie was released to Netflix viewers on February 3, 2023.

Star Performer– Chuks Joseph

Being the main cast, he was left to take us on the journey of how the lead victim felt, and he didn’t do bad at all, even for a newcomer on the movie scene.

Can-do-better Performer-Nil