by Remi Jordan.
Grandiosity and ambition in the craft of cinema should be made sterner stuff, and if one decides to embark on the creation of serious art then one must consider internalising a level of consistency and finesse. Niyi Akinmolayan’s House of Secrets is a visual Icarus that flew too close to the sun one-winged. A directorial Evel Knievel that earns profits and reverence for the attempt.
The Niyi Akinmolayan picture isn’t void of any substance or visual elegance. It is rich in the latter, actually. Cinema is visual storytelling, after all, but something stands out like a sore thumb. The storytelling itself is as scattered and substantially ungrounded as its main character’s memory. House of Secrets – without giving the core of the plot away – is a story about a woman named Sarah (Onajite Dede/Efe Irele) trying to piece together her memory like the world’s most complex jigsaw, plagued by a neurotic perplexity and haunting fact that she is a key character in a coup d’etat and the political scheme in military rule Nigeria.
Much like a reverie induced by the sunday evening sunset, house of secrets is painterly even when it is void of the loudest of colours. The flashbacks are indicated through the quintessential use of colour, the old logic that in cinema, one must only or mostly remember in a monochromatic format. The visual language takes us on a journey, even if said journey is narratively unflattering. However, what Akinmolayan does perfectly here is sticking to the fundamentals, letting the immanent beauty of the location and light do the work for you. Sometimes, a great shot is one simple shot held for a few more seconds than envisaged, letting the viewer immerse themselves in the world being presented to them. House of Secrets shows, without excess, it embodies what fine filmmaking could be, visually. But the complementary key component by the name of good writing is absent. Like a ballerina with a damaged ankle, it does not stick to the landing after the elegant pirouette.
The plot is the least thing to worry about in certain genres of cinema, but not this one – a political thriller that presents itself as Hitchcockian. The amnesiac woman. A distant past. An old lover. An orchestration of schemes. The fate of a nation. Sensuality and glimpses of lovers. These are the makings of the quintessential thriller that airs ad nauseam on Dstv channels and still manages to hold your attention.
House of Secrets narratively evades any form of coherence. That is not to be confused with an indication of density or an impenetrable film – it is merely tiring in certain parts, and it almost erodes the beauty of the cinematography. Our unreliable narrator, Sarah, isn’t just unreliable anymore – she’s inexplicable, almost mythological. Making the dream-like structure of the film obliterate itself into a plethora of gaping plot holes. What was once a dream morphed into a sequence of question marks floating around the screen like a hoard of mice in a maze. One should never use the word “boring” as a serious critique because films are allowed to be languid, and not everything is contingent on fast-paced storytelling, but at some point, you get the sense that the script wore itself out in anticipation of something new. Worse plots have made for greater films because they got one salient thing right – execution.
Nevertheless, coming off Chief Daddy, something one could call a typical cash grab or a creative immolation to make something worthy of artistic reverence, this is a fine effort. Akinmolayan flew close to the sun with this film, one winged with a miscalculated momentum, but he flew regardless, an act that deserves our appraisals. Every director has a purple patch moment where they plunge into a passion project with the hopes that it erases the conviviality and immaturity of the last ones with its seriousness and complex themes; they hope this is the one they own after making a tent pole for the corporations and profiteering. And sometimes they succeed – this isn’t one of those times. Sometimes they fail – this isn’t one of those times either. This is the grey area where you can tell they are catching a glimpse of what they’re capable of creating if they let the story simmer if they let the idea work in tandem with the camera.
House of Secrets is an attempt we should applaud for a while because a ballerina with a sprained ankle is still a ballerina, and Niyi Akinmolayan has shown here that he might have an ear for musicality. We just hope next time, if he goes in this direction, he sticks the landing.