Ossyking Movies Ind., Ltd., presents, Sylvester Madu (Jerry), Ogechi Peters (Lisa), Digida Dunhill (Don), Ravour Emmanuel (Betty), Okolo Kizmary Emmanuel (Ekem), Ngozi Ude (Aunty). Screenplay/Director/Casting, Sylvester Madu; Director of Photography, Goodnews Erico Isika; Producer, Eze Osita Onyebuchi. (C 2017
The auteur, Sylvester Madu achieves his level of ambition in this project. He aimed at spooking us, which he did; he relentlessly chases our emotions to the brink, and to the limit. He did. We keep running for our lives, at first for no reason, from faces that look like a bunch of scarecrows, but no, they are the faces of a six months old dead and buried human skulls of corpses, with stubborn facial skins still dangling. Creepy. Jerry, (Sylvester Madu) his wife, Lisa (Ogechi Peters), and daughter, Betty (Ravour Emmanuel) and I, the author, keep running from the four masked men. At one point I and Jerry’s wife on the screen, coincidentally ask the same question in unison: “Why are we running?” No answer, but I keep running along with them, away from these menacing machine-gun toting masked men who can stop at nothing.
The film opens to a disturbing dream sequence of Jerry taking bullets in the chest, from a pistol few yards away by a man who holds his daughter, Betty as a hostage. Jerry startled from the nightmare like a fish out of water and rattled as he rushes to check on his daughter, but she’s not in her room. Outside, where his daughter is sitting and crying, she narrates a similar galling dream she experienced in her sleep: A faceless-hooded-man has chased her in her dream, and she had run to mother and dad and vigorously shakes them to wake but to no avail. Such phantasma, the father, and daughter separately had, is sure a warning of the dark day that breaks on them.
Imagine a man takes out his family to breakfast in a restaurant, at a time when most of his neighbors couldn’t afford a bowl of gari for their families, lest they take them out to eat. If they did provide a bowl of farina, maybe they would do without sugar or milk to pour over it. Jerry is serene, having breakfast with his family, laughing and eating at the same time. He can afford breakfast in a restaurant. He’s middle class. Life is good and dandy for the three. Of a sudden, Jerry’s phone rings, he answers, but the line goes dead. He goes downstairs to check on the caller, who he thought was hanging out there, but hurriedly comes back into the upstairs restaurant and scrambles his wife and daughter and together scamper out of there. They hardly make it out the door when bullets flew at them from a runaway unknown sedan car. He shuffles his terrorized family into their jeep and speeds away. Jerry’s peaceful breakfast with his family shatters, and now they are running for their lives. But why, and running from who?
At this point, the life of Jerry and his family are in danger; no one knows who’s shooting at them from the sedan car. He temporarily seeks refuge in a friend’s Ekem (Okolo Kizmary Emmanuel), home and leaves his wife, Lisa (Ogechi Peters) and daughter there while he goes to check on his house. The masked men have been in his home and left behind a note for him. Back at his friend’s house, Betty hides in a water container while Ekem puts an empty barrel over Lisa’s head before the masked gunmen could get into his compound. They shoot him and leave him dying, for refusing to give the location of Jerry.
For the safety of his family, Jerry takes his family from the city to his village, to his mother where the community vows to protect them. Not long, however, the four masked men arrive, and there’s confrontation with the rag-tag posse of vigilantes. The masked men disable one of the vigilantes, shoot at Jerry’s daughter, but the bullet slightly pierces her forehead, and they (masked men) hurriedly make away back to the city, with Jerry’s wife as a hostage. Jerry shoots one of them in the leg as they scamper back into their car and speed away.
When I discovered that our auteur has received numerous international awards in psychotherapy and even as marvelous as the Sigmund Freud award in Vienna, I understand now the expertise he uses to psychologically tickle the audience, including me, in the Payback. Sylvester Madu didn’t use charcoal black faces and ruby red lips Vodoo old men to scare us out of our skins, he uses humans, who he portrays here as the spiritual darkness of humankind. We experience the writer and director’s sense of psychology as he takes us gradually through that emotional journey to the pit of our greatest fears-fear of the unknown.
Payback is a psychological thriller. While Madu never discusses fear in his work, he suggests merely factors and instances that provoke anxiety and terror. For example, the loud hallway shootings, juxtaposing it with the sharp cutting (editing), make poor hearts jolt. He’s theorizing here that ‘fear’ as a noun has no meaning than when used as a verb, as a raw material in a dramatic form in a circumstance that will generate its essence. Fear doth exist, but it becomes existential only when we confront it, and at length, the Sage is asserting the unreasonable fear, the unjustified terror which paralyzes effort to defend oneself in the face of it. Madu plays with both concern here: rational and irrational.
The fear Jerry and his family are running away from is the unknown. Group of people shooting at them is rational at first, with the understanding that this is a usual occurrence in most parts of Lagos. Under such circumstances, one only runs out of the area. The fear, however, becomes irrational when Jerry is unable to ward the masked men off his tail. Crazy, don’t it? Except for our phobias-don’t let me drive through a clover bridge, for fear of heights-the experience of one’s life in imminent danger when one is powerless to fight back, creates the sort of fear and anxiety quite unequal and irrational. It’s torture all by itself.
Mr. Madu opens our eyes to the spectacular. He labors tenuously, to bring us face to face with our fears when at last the four masked men confront the vigilantes in the village in the presence of his wife and daughter. To the spectator, we assume it as a conclusion, but Madu has not done psyching us yet. He takes us on another rigmarole back to the city in search of Lisa, his wife, in custody of the masked men.
Only after we have followed the masked men and found them in their abode, and putting Jerry and his wife side by side, did we get first-hand information (flashback) about the reason, why Jerry and his family are on the run, (no spoiler here). Sylvester Madu focuses his attention not so much on the art side of telling this story, though, that too won’t be underestimated, hence, not much dialogue, and fantastic camera angle shots, but he exploited the human mind. I heaved a sigh when Jerry, at last, explain to his wife the eight years old relationship with the four men who have made their one day a living hell.
Come to think of what Sylvester Madu says in his Payback, here’s what James Brown says in his Payback lyrics.
Sold me out, for chicken change (yes you did!)
Told me that they, they had it all arranged
You had me down, and that’s a fact
Now you punk, You gotta get ready
For the big payback! (the big payback!)
That’s where I land, the big payback (the big payback!)