Code of Silence

Code of Silence is a movie about a girl who gets raped. Except that it’s not your typical nollywood movie about a girl who gets raped. It does not subscribe to many of the usual pitfalls and it is does not have the average mindset. But does this make it a great movie?

In Code of Silence, Adamma, a young girl living with her widowed mother and caring brother, finds herself in a precarious situation one night on her way back home from school. She gets abducted and taken to the home of a popular politician where he proceeds to take away her innocence. The movie is about how she and her family cope with this incident afterwards.

Code of Silence was a really good story but it was an alright movie. It brings up a lot of valid questions from the scenarios but as a movie it could have dug deeper emotionally. For instance, in the scene after the rape, as a viewer you feel like you should be crying but the scene is not set up to allow you to arrive at that point emotionally.

The difference between code of silence as an ‘alright movie’ that it was, versus code of silence as a great movie that it could have been would have been delving further into the emotions of Adamma or her mother after the rape. We get a lot of on the surface time and time spent on societal perception – which isn’t bad but doesn’t necessarily allow the viewer to feel with the victim. We see Adamma sad and we see her quiet but you don’t feel her sadness or feel her quiet. The one character whose emotions we were able to see rise was that of the brother, played by Shawn Faqua. By the end, you could see how he had changed from the loving playful brother to an emotionally distraught wreck. On the flip side for Adamma, the main victim, not enough time was spent on that.

One beautiful thing about this movie was the chemistry between the actors. You might have seen some of these actors individually in roles before and they might have been alright or you might have not particularly loved them. However, together in this movie most of the actors played off each other’s strengths and brought out the ‘better’ in each other.

Makida Moka who plays the lead role in this movie is well suited to the role and does enough justice to it. The only critique would be that she is yet to graduate to a level where she lets the character take control. Her performance seems broken at times, especially in the beginning, by her as individual coming through instead of letting the character envelope her.

The movie had beautiful performances around the board but the spotlight goes to Shawn Faqua especially for being able to depict the changes in his character over time. It was ironically interesting to see that in this movie Patience Ozokwor – a whole Mama G – was the mother of the victim yet her role here was a bit more subdued than it usually is.

The audio in the movie was weak at some points and the story could have taken off higher than it did if it delved more into the emotions. However, Code of Silence, is a memorable movie because it does not follow the same formula. It does not attack the victim at any point yet it manages to bring up the societal question marks. Code of Silence is a worthy watch the first time but it in order to be worth watching again a little more is needed.