You know, when the trailer of this movie dropped, I mentioned how confused it left me. It was like there was no actual story in the movie, just a mashup of scenes that didn’t add up. After watching the movie, it’s safe to say that my initial thoughts were valid because I was still left with the same effect.
The New Normal is a story about four different couples going through different things, and then a single mother, who is meant to be the main focus of the story, just going about her life in a manner I can’t even explain.
To start with, let me just say that the only sure thing about this movie is the fact that Bimbo Akintola will forever deliver in her roles because she is an absolute gem. Almost every other part of the movie should not have existed.
The story was seriously all over the place. A lot of things happened that didn’t add up. It was so bad that the actual sequence of the movie was very flawed. It tried to rely on “wokeness” to bring out that ‘pow’ effect but it more or less exploded in their faces.
For instance, there was a scene in which one of the wives came to her friend’s house, she met her husband crying, saw blood on the floor and a living room that looks fresh out of a crime scene just begging to be investigated. She ran out of the house, stood in front of a police station, and called her other friends. When they got there, they talked amongst themselves and said “let’s not report it yet. Let us go and investigate and tell our husbands to go meet him and ask if he killed her.”
Then there’s the story of an erection that lasts a full 36 hours. Oh yes, you read that right. 36 hours. Medically speaking, if an erection lasts more than 5 hours, then it’s already an emergency that requires immediate medical attention. But a man had a 36-hour erection and was going about his day with his erection.
All these don’t even quantify how off the story was.
Visually, it also wasn’t easy watching the movie as 90% of the time, all indoor scenes were poorly lit. I don’t know if that was a deliberate move because indoor lighting like that is usually done in scenes that require some form of intimidation or in a film with characters that have a dark side.
P.S: I don’t think I can stand watching another “Naija comedian/influencer posing as a pastor to come and do deliverance or something like that” scene. It’s already as overflogged as using the Lekki-Ikoyi bridge in Nollywood movies.
Overall, I expected the movie to reflect actual new normals and how they can be accepted, viewed differently, and worked on. But the “normal” expressed in the story are things that have been around and out in the open for generations.
Is The New Normal worth watching? No, it isn’t. It was an unsatisfying experience.