by Akinwande Jordan
Let us begin with a few principles before we get in The Devil is a Liar. We write about film, we watch film, we deliberate over the intricacies of film for the love of the art and the discipline that sustains it. Our axioms and postulates as critics, as audience members, as literate enthusiasts, should not be in service of mindless castigation or blind celebration. Criticism of any kind is anchored in the totality of experience.
It should remain tethered to the essence of the art, even when it is severe. Taunting is unjustifiable. Cheap mockery is without value. Pretentiousness, if it occurs, must serve the purposes of elucidation and pedagogy, never as a means to cultivate a sense of superiority. The critic’s responsibility is to dissect and recontextualize. That is the great commission of art. It is not unlike spreading a gospel. You serve the people and the artist as a critic; you are the aqueduct of reason. You can be wrong, but you never make the error of passivity. That will get you killed.
In recent years, however, the Nigerian film critic, for love of art and country, has been cast in the role of an embittered figure, the proverbial spoilsport who rains on parades. There is some truth to that perception, because someone must be the blunt voice of reason, the sober friend at the party, the misanthrope who tempers collective optimism. Yet this posture has evolved into something else. The ire of and for criticism has grown corrosive. The tone has become weary, repetitive, and exasperating. What began as principled rigor now risks devolving into a sermon of despair.
Watching Moses Inwang’s The Devil is a Liar makes this tension palpable. Halfway through the second act, one anticipates opening a blank document with the familiar sigh, already rehearsing the sentences that will capture the disappointment. So you are permitted to stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
Released on Netflix and directed by Moses Inwang, The Devil is a Liar positions itself within a familiar tradition. It promises the tale of a woman who loses everything and must claw her way back. At its center is Adaora Phillips (played by Nse Ikpe-Etim), a successful woman in her late thirties. She is accomplished in her career, yet haunted by the pressures of marriage. Society whispers its disapproval of her singlehood. Her family eyes her with expectation. She herself cannot escape the conviction that her achievements are incomplete without a husband.
When she finally weds Jaiye (James Gardiner), the picture appears whole: love, companionship, stability. But perfection in cinema is rarely permitted to last. The marriage soon fractures under the weight of betrayal and manipulation. Adaora’s life is stripped to its barest frame. Friends recede. Wealth disappears. Love curdles into malice. What follows is a descent and a struggle for reconstitution, culminating in a narrative of revenge and empty platitudes.
This is fertile ground for a psychological drama or a taut domestic thriller, yet the film falters in its execution. The dialogue, often heavy with exposition, substitutes telling for showing. Scenes linger past their necessity, draining momentum from moments that should hold tension. Key revelations arrive without buildup, collapsing emotional stakes into predictability. Even the film’s central conceit—evil personified through betrayal—feels reduced to a series of tropes we have encountered too often. Writing these feels like Groundhog Day, and I’m Bill Murray tethered to a keyboard.
Nse Ikpe-Etim brings gravity to Adaora, grounding her anguish like a veteran. Yet performance cannot fully compensate for apparent deficiencies. The script does not allow its characters to venture beyond archaic iterations of archetypes. Conflict is externalized to the point where interiority, which should carry the weight of the drama, feels absent, and James Gardiner’s performance is nothing more than a hollow offering of an attractive man trying to show an inkling of profundity.
The problem is not about the familiarity of the narrative. Familiarity can still yield resonance. If you are of the Christopher Booker school of thought, there are, after all, only seven basic plots. The problem is the lack of modulation between suffering and reprieve, between vulnerability and strength. The trajectory of Adaora’s arc is moulded into nothing more than a gambit to hint at something unrecognisable in lieu of focusing squarely on moments that dissect the cultural value of matrimony and the supposed “horror” of the aging unmarried Nigerian woman. Instead, old habits abound, the ghost of Nollywood’s past haunts us like Hamlet’s father, asking Moses Inwang to retreat to the unbearably cliché because — well — it works.
This is where the critic’s disillusionment deepens. Not because the film is wholly without merit, but because the repetition signals a broader crisis. The same beats, the same turns, the same chassis of melodrama replicated across titles until the exercise of watching becomes a rehearsal of foreknowledge. We arrive at the fatigue that critics do not often confess: the exhaustion of encountering variations of the same narrative while yearning for rupture, for surprise, for an aesthetic risk that unsettles expectation, for a blow to the face, a meditation on the old, the new, the unexplored.
To write about such a film is to wrestle with that fatigue. One resists the temptation to descend into cynicism because cynicism, once entrenched, blinds as thoroughly as blind praise. Yet the frustration lingers. It is the frustration of potential squandered, of craft that settles for adequacy rather than ambition. In articulating this, the critic returns to the first principle: the work of criticism is not to destroy but to demand more, to call forth the possibilities of art, even in its most compromised form. It’s a difficult responsibility to uphold when there frankly isn’t much to work with.
Inwang’s Devil is a Liar is by no stretch of the imagination the worst film ever made, but it does risk being forgotten and consigned to the inferno of uniformity — writing about it does feel like a Sisyphean task. I can feel the boulder rolling back once more.
