The Weekend

Many of us look on the concept of “family” as sacred and unassailable. But, if someone were to stringently advise you against meeting his or her relatives, it may be a recommendation worth heeding, as seen in this intense Nigerian horror thriller. When a young woman (Uzoamaka Aniunoh) who grew up as an only child under a single mother pleads with her fiancé (Bucci Franklin) to introduce her to his family, he emphatically recommends against it, insisting that they’re not the kind of people that she should want to meet. However, his lack of elaboration as to why only steels her resolve to make this happen, eventually prompting him to reluctantly relent to her wishes. They thus set off for a weekend visit to the rural village of his parents (Gloria Young, Keppy Ekpenyong-Bassey) for their golden wedding anniversary celebration. Once there, though, his family’s dark secrets slowly emerge, leading to the disclosure of shocking revelations that live up to all the advanced billing attributed to them. To say more would reveal too much, but suffice it to say that the trip discloses much more than what the young bride-to-be had bargained for. In telling this story, director Daniel Oriahi serves up a perfectly gruesome tale filled with lots of good scares and a deliciously macabre sense of humor that grows progressively more campy with each passing frame. Indeed, it’s the kind of yarn that will leave viewers nervously laughing at events that they probably think they shouldn’t be giggling about, but therein lies the film’s carefully crafted guilty pleasure appeal. Admittedly, those qualities may not be as readily apparent as they probably ought to be in the picture’s opening act, leaving audience members thinking that the narrative is unduly mean-spirited, but those developments are all integral to the setup for what’s to come, a foundation that allows this offering’s wicked humor to surface in all its grisly glory. The filmmaker deftly presents his material for maximum shock value but without becoming gratuitous or grotesque, quite a feat for a movie like this, one very much in line with the principles of Hitchcock’s Rule that one’s imagination is far more effective in conjuring ghastly images than anything the director could possibly depict on screen. “The Weekend” is thus one of those pictures that will evoke notions of what it feels like to whistle one’s way through the graveyard at midnight on Halloween, leaving viewers with lots of good frights but nevertheless secure in the knowledge that they’ll emerge from the theater well and intact, able to face yet another day, even if it means occasionally looking over their shoulder to see that there are no unwelcome relatives following them home.