By Akinwande Jordan
Poster for Fatimah Gimsay’s Fine Girl
A sinister spectre is haunting the estate. A siren. A banshee. A witch of sorts, or maybe she’s just a woman scorned with a bone to pick with the fetid worldwide boy’s club. She’s there to teach the faux diffident men with lustful eyes that watching is the only sin they are permitted. She’s there to teach the confident men with lustful eyes that the commentary should be said with a muted tone.
This is from the cabinet of Fatimah Gimsay’s curiosities. She’s no stranger to the writing room or the industry, having written for multiple shows and films such as Ijo (2022), Omezi (2023), etc.
Starring Obehi Aburime (Venge, Tinsel) and Martha Orhiere ( Wura, No Letters to Miss Seemah) — Fatimah Gimsay’s Fine Girl does not open with that ominous figure previously painted. Instead, we are introduced quietly to the beauty of recognisable urbanism through the eyes of a man (Obehi Aburime) lurking with his phone camera when his lenses come upon a girl (Martha Orhiere).
The girl, the fine girl, is more of an apparition. She insists that her pictures be deleted from the man’s phone. The man cajoles and compliments, claiming beauty is meant to be photographed, before pretending to oblige her request. The man goes home. He takes a shower. He exits. He finds her there, phone in hand, showing him that he has been caught dead to rights. Befuddled, he scurries, and he pleads.
The girl teleports across the man’s house. Tormenting him. Seducing him. Enslaving him. Fatimah Gimsay’s directorial savvy relies on the familiar and the signifiers of the run-of-the-mill tension in Nollywood supernatural horror. She doesn’t shy away from her influences on her not-so-greenhorn sleeves. Less is more for her. And the basis of every good film, short or feature, is the aptitude to illustrate what one might deem a sticky situation.
Fatimah Gimsay has written a sticky situation with experienced aptitude. What if you disobeyed a simple instruction from an evil human-like demon, unbeknownst to you? It’s the perfect depiction of man’s hubris and lust for impunity.
The feminist reading of this short film is apparent. It serves as a cautionary tale against asking women to smile. Unrefined minds might regard the film as misandrist.
The idea of a woman trapping a man with wandering eyes calls the “man-eaters are a tired trope“ brigade to come knocking. But whether or not you are of the conservative ilk, watching a man-eater dominate men speaks to a part of you that enjoys the notion of a woman who is judge, jury, and executioner.
We love a supernatural femme fatale, one from hell. The film ends with a piercing non-verbal fourth wall break that exudes a sense of tension and suspense punctuated with the pleading wails of a man from a phone. We begin again from the start, the lenses of a camera —the frame of the lurker, only this time the watchman is being watched.
