Review: Seven Doors, A Movie Beyond Fiction

BY BUSY BRAIN

Title: Seven Doors
Producer: Femi Adebayo
Directors: Tope Adebayo/Adebayo Tijani
Writer: Adebayo Tijani/Yinka Olaoye
Reviewer: Busy Brain

The movie is a satirical reflection of human nature, live struggles in the course of self actualization and a typical nature of Nigeria society lurked with greed, jealousy, hatred, betrayal, position and abuse of power.

Seven doors is a beautiful work of fiction with a storyline built around Ilara Kingdom. It gives the nostalgic feelings of 19th century with setting, costume, and dialogue style drawing inferences of how kingship and royalty has been a skull of an elephant which a child cannot toy with until date. Seven doors expose chaos in royalty, a perfect paradigm of the popular saying, all that glitters are not gold. The illegal delay in the installation of new king for Ilara Kingdom as a result of corruption by kingmakers is a prevalent issue in modern society where efforts to install new kings are sabotaged by kingmakers and external forces for personal gains.

The story uses Kola Ajeyemi, Oba Adejuwon whose quest for power and position at all cost murdered his brother and subsequently used his seven wives for rituals to atone death. This portrays how people engage in satanic adventure to attain position, amass wealth and acquire power. The height of wickedness and heartless endeavour of people in the corridor of power is still pervasive in the society. People kill, maim, and go extra miles to gain position at all cost without minding consequences. Oba Adejuwon approaches Esusu and acceded to offer his seven wives without consequences.

The Movie uses the torments troubles and horrific experience of Femi Adebayo, Oba Adedunjoye, the son of Adejuwon of Ilara Kingdom to solidify law ‘karmic debt’ and ancestral foundational curse. Femi Adebayo uses his reign as the king of Ilara to suffer for what he knows nothing about. He pays the price of the atrocities committed by his forbear. In this regard, the producer uses the movie to pass a message beyond fiction. People, communities, nations hardship, pangs, and pains could be a price of injustice, extra judicial killings, ritual killings and unjust bloodshed. The producer uses his storyline to pinch individuals, groups, communities, and nation as a whole to do a background check on certain conditions on the pages of history. Most times, people impute God for human factor nemesis. God does good all the time. One of the obvious messages from the storyline is that creatures are enemies of creatures, not the creator. Nigeria coup era, murder of MKO Abiola, Kudirat Abiola, Dele Giwa among other killings during power tussle could be a corollary to Nigeria’s frying pan to fire condition. Who knows?

Seven doors present four antagonists, Adebayo Salami, Saka, Jide Kosoko and Muyiwa Ademola to play opposition role against Oba Adedunjoye to create a suspense of being the major cause of the woes betiding Ilara community. The chiefs go extra mile to instigate deadly staff bearer, Gabriel Afolayan to kill the king and luckily, loyal father of King’s friend offered himself to stop the staff bearer. In every circumstance, loyalty will always have a role.

The roles of the chiefs is significant to portray enemies of progress in every family, organisation, institution community or nation. The producer uses the antagonists to reveal that people will continually look for other’s downfall, envy one another, strive at all cost to take position and at the same time be a distraction to tackle the primary problem. The use of flashback shed light to the fact that the chiefs play the role to enhance suspense.

Femi Adebayo in seven doors movie preaches determination, resilience, love, unity in diversity through his wife, common goal, courage, and perseverance as a strong factor to overcome challenges but leaving a message that no one can upturn destiny without regrets like his forbear who seeks for death after meeting esusu for ritual.

Meanwhile, the movie supposed to give alternative solutions to the difficulties rather than portraying fighting esusu as the only solution. The question is how many people facing problems they know nothing about know where esusu belongs to. The movie should have provided a soft landing as subtle way to overcome challenges rather than engaging in a physical fight with esusu. Similarly, the chiefs in the movie who demolished houses, killed innocent person seeking justice, abuse their power by allocating land to multiple users supposed not to go unpunished to match the central idea of the movie.

The setting blend well with the costume, the directors perform a wonderful job with perfect effect to create illusion of reality in the first ritual scene and accident scene. The lighting is a perfect match, the cinematography is excellent and dialogue blend well with translation. All the actors played their roles excellently with touch of comic relief by the antagonists. The movie is a must-watch, it is full of message that is in tandem with the primitive and modern era.