When you grow up watching Disney Channel, Nickelodeon, and other Western content, it not only influences your vocabulary but also shapes your views and expectations of certain things around you. You might find yourself expecting a prom to take place in your school (even though you attend Jesus is Alive secondary school where boys and girls have different dining halls) or thinking you’ll get “detention” when you do something wrong only to get a rude awakening when your principal hands you a two-week suspension letter.
Similarly, this Western influence seems to have also affected Nigerian/Ghanaian filmmaker’s perspectives of what a typical secondary school in those places looks like because when I watched Deranged, I did not expect to hear things like a “substitute teacher” and “freshman year”, or for characters to have names like “Kinorah” “Aquila,” “Zenobia” “Kaylyn” and most of all, I did not expect to see a 35 — year old Nadia Buari playing a secondary school student.
Nadia Buari as Kaylyn Koleman giving those “I am the main character” eyes.
Deranged is a 2017 film written by Nadia Buari, produced by Nadia Buari, and directed by Jameel Buhari (You guessed it, Nadia Buari’s brother). The plot follows Benny Essiam Essiam, a married substitute teacher played by Ramsey Nouah, who begins work at an unnamed secondary school where one of his students, Kaylyn Koleman (played by Nadia Buari) develops an obsession with him.
Let me get the good things out of the way which will be very little so stay with me. This is Jameel Buari’s directorial debut and it is always impressive when a director completes a project. The color grading of the film also works and sets up the thrilling, psychological world with its choice of colors. If only it had delivered what the colors promised.
Karyn Koleman in the first stage of her obsession.
Now let’s get to the not-so-good aspects of the film. Stay with me, this is going to be a bit long. The first thing wrong with this movie is the plot. It doesn’t have any. Things just happen unprovoked. One minute, Aquila, one of the students seems to be flirting with Benny, the next minute, she is telling Benny about her love life, next thing, we never see her in the film again.
Speaking of things that just happen and never come up again, there is a scene where Kaylyn’s mother whose name I didn’t care to learn wants to carry a box and Kaylyn rushes to her like there is a human body in the box (which would have been an interesting turn of events) but alas, we’ll never know because that box is never brought up again and we never find out why she acted that way.
Honestly, who was this guy?
Perhaps we wouldn’t notice how bad the story and plot of this film was if there was good acting to keep us distracted but brace yourself because the acting is more chaotic than the plot. Nobody does a remotely convincing enough job of playing their roles. Not Ramsey Nouah as a substitute teacher, not Nadia Buari as a student, not Aquila as a student, not Kaylyn’s Mom who sucks as moming, not Benny’s wife who sucks as wifing, nobody brings any ounce of believability to their roles. I’ve seen better actors in a student film, students much younger than the cast of this movie might I add.
There are no words for how cringey this scene is.
The only thing worse than the acting in this movie is the dialogue. If you can sit through the made up accents and actually listen to the dialogue, you are in for a lot of cringe and confusion. Characters just talk so you know their lips can move because what they often discuss adds nothing to the plot. If anything, the dialogue is there to bring you confusion. In one scene, after Benny hands Aquila her assignment, he accuses her of plagiarizing and says she should redo the assignment and submit it by the next period. In the next scene, Aquila goes to Benny to ask if she can redo her assignment and he says okay. The same assignment he literally just told her to redo? It’s like the first conversation never even happened so why then did it happen only to happen again?
Benny and his wife delivering some spicy dialogue while reading the instructions of an inhaler.
A sillier example of this is when Kaylyn’s mother cautions her for failing her classes and Kaylyn suggests her mother asks Mr. Benny to be her home tutor. Her mother authoritatively says “That is my call to make, not yours” and storms off. Sounds like the mother is not going to just let this happen, right? Wrong. In the next scene, we see Benny telling his wife that Kaylyn’s mother has called to ask him to tutor Kaylyn. He tells the wife she says “no,” he’s not going to do it. The wife gives a resounding “No!.” Sounds like Benny is not going to tutor Kaylyn after all, right? Wrong again. In the next scene, Benny arrives to start tutoring. What then was the point of the initial dialogues that seemed to create conflict if nothing came out of them?
Which brings me to the final thing so wrong with this film. The characters just do things in a way that makes no sense. Earlier on in the movie, Kaylyn’s mom tries to snoop through her daughter’s laptop for absolutely no reason. Still on Kaylyn’s mom, she shows up at a party to confront Kaylyn about her grades in the strangest way. What happened to confronting her at home? Whose mother goes to parties, confronts their child for failing, and then still leaves said child at the party? For more examples of this, observe Kaylyn’s mom during the entire film because almost nothing she says or does makes any sense.
Apparently Kaylyn’s mom does have a name but I promise you, you’ll forget it as soon as you hear it.
Still on characters doing strange things, we have characters acting out of character, unprovoked. Benny is presented as some smart, no-nonsense teacher but he makes a choice towards the end of the film (which I don’t want to spoil for you) that absolutely makes no sense and you’re left wondering, why did he even do that?
This film is alleged to be a drama/psychological thriller but it lacks in all three genres. It belongs to a whole new genre called “a mess.” If you’re looking for a nice thriller to keep you at the edge of your seat this weekend, you’d be doing yourself a favor if you looked somewhere else. But, if you are looking for an illogical plot coupled with bad acting and terrible dialogue, Deranged awaits your viewership.
