Ghanaian Movie
Movie Review: Bibi Bright returns with a “Promise Beyond”
Promise Beyond is a beautiful slow paced romantic drama that follows the life of Victor Asare (Frank Leonard) who’s platonic relationship with childhood best friend Tess (Zynnell Zuh) affects all other romantic relationships he finds himself in. Even though they both agree that they do not have any amorous feelings for each other, nothing or nobody seems strong or challenging enough to tear them apart. Can there be a difference between mere friendship and unconditional love?
The underlying theme of this story is something you can easily associate yourself with if you have ever had to choose between a partner and a friend regardless of your gender. The writer did an awesome job of telling this story from the most basic and relatable angle without having to make it too complex or unnecessarily winding.
The first few opening scenes have a way of making the viewer actually question the relationship between Victor and Tess. But as the story unfolds enough hints and details are given to help you get a definite understanding of the back story of their questionable relationship. Thus giving the plot more weight and clarity. We can’t stress enough on how much appreciative we are that this story didn’t bore us with any unnecessary flashback scenes.
The dialogues gave us all that we needed to know about each character in relation to their significance in the development of the story line.
Acting wise, the overall performance from the cast was spot on. We seem to feel the combination of the cast couldn’t have been any better. Very noticeable was the performance from actress Amanda Ebeye. Her role as a jealous and almost delusional girlfriend of Victor wouldn’t have come easy if she didn’t understand her character enough and couldn’t channel the right emotions to nail it. Zynnell Zuh and Jose Tolbert gave us that usual “class act” we’ve come to know them both for over these few years.
Princess Shyngle has our attention now with her role in this movie. We are looking forward to her next movie to see what else she has in store for us. Bibi Bright who produced this movie also did enough to impress us with her role. Even though she didn’t have that many scenes like we were expecting to see, she gave us a decent and flawless performance with her character in this movie.
At the center of the performances was Nigerian actor Frank Leonard. This is the first time any of us at GhMoviefreak.com has seen him on screen but we were all overly impressed with his performance. His delivery of his character as Victor came too easy and natural for him. His presence was solid in every scene and he clearly was able to channel all the right emotions needed to make his character relatable. We would dare not miss out on the next movie he is cast in just to further confirm our assumptions about him.
With all the headlines about this movie costing about 75,000ghc (about 20,000USD) to make, which is quite a huge budget than we mostly hear about making a movie here in Ghana, we certainly were quite interested in seeing how the production elements would play out in completing this movie and proving its worth.
We observed that the screenplay made use of multiple angles and several cuts for each scene which we found quite impressive. As much as this was almost perfectly executed we did notice all the continuity flaws that most of the scenes had. The editing bench did a fair job at keeping the constantly switching angles fluid enough to mask out the continuity flaws. Hence there was nothing major enough to deflect the viewers’ attention unless you were paying close attention like we were.
Also we found the sound quality almost flawless. Surprisingly a fairly awesome job was done with the beach and lake side scenes. All the dialogue from those scenes was very audible and all external noise interferences like the sound from the beach waves were properly controlled. Again the switching angles exposed some almost pardonable lip syncing slip-ups at the beach scene.
We were a bit let down with a few scenes that had the audio fluctuating and left the characters inaudible.
Being that this was quite a slow paced movie we would have loved to have heard some actual songs accompany some of the scenes instead of the background score that was also fairly well done.
Considering this being Bibi Bright’s Carridad Films second production we would rate this movie a well-deserved, 7.8/10.
Promise Beyond is one of those movies that you go to without high hopes thinking it’s just “another one” of those movies, but you end up leaving quite impressed, well entertained and fairly satisfied. It does have the right amount of dramatic suspense that makes you want to sit through it to the end. And that unexpected twist at end was certainly worth it.
If you’ve ever found yourself in a relationship were you have had to choose between your partner and that close friend you very much sure you can’t imagine spending the rest of your life without, this is the movie for you.
In case you missed out on last night premiere some reason, do well to go see this movie too and tell us what you think about it.
Please do well to share your comments, opinions and feedback on this movie in the comments section below as well.
Watch Trailer Below
