Linda Ikeji’s “Dark October” which chronicles the infamous “Aluu four boys” tragic incident which happened in Port-Harcourt in 2012 is now streaming on Netflix, and we bring you a review of it.
The newly released film which was inspired by true events, was directed by Toka McBaror and produced by blogger Linda Ikeji.
The Aluu Four lynching was a necklace lynching involving four young men from the University of Port Harcourt, Ugonna Obuzor, Toku Lloyd, Chiadika Biringa, and Tekena Elkanah.
The students went to the Omuokiri Aluu community in search of a debtor to one of them when the debtor (who is still at large) allegedly raised the alarm and accused them of taking his laptop and other belongings.
An outraged crowd rushed down on the students and savagely battered them without properly interrogating them. They were marched through different parts of the neighbourhood before being set ablaze.
Aimed at preaching against Jungle Justice, Dark October revolves around these four university students in Nigeria who were falsely accused of theft and lynched to death in a mob attack that sparked nationwide outrage.
You see, Dark October is not an enjoyable movie, instead, it opens up old wounds especially if you watched the traumatizing ALUU videos back in 2012. It starts off really slow and then became boring at some point and dragged on till the last few scenes when the boys were gruesomely murdered.
The producers didn’t want to jump directly into the point about jungle justice so they tried to first build up the four characters who were involved in the lynching, however, it was such a difficult movie to watch. The best part of Dark October was the worst part of the true story that inspired it.
The production was tight however the background music wasn’t very loud in some of the scenes. The acting performance of the characters wasn’t that fantastic, well, what did we expect? Many of the characters aren’t known faces; however, they tried their best way in bringing their roles to life .
Oh, by the way, we loved how the actors who played the ill-fated quartet shared a striking resemblance with the real-life victims, and the producer, Linda Ikeji, deserves recognition for her attention to detail in the timing of each event in real-time and the overall plot coherence.
From us at Kemi FIlani, it is a 6/10.
