Movie Review: Beautiful Ruins; When it’s Beautiful Don’t Ruin it

EN Entertainment is certainly not new to this industry and they have come to grow on us with several projects such as “Could This Be Love”, Royal Diadem” and “Shattered Romance” just to mention a few. When a great actor successfully transitions into an equally great director you can tell from anything they touch how much they have learned from the industry and how much more they are willing to contribute to its steady and much needed growth. Beautiful Ruins is a good example of the push that this industry needs.

This film follows the life of Abynah a successful actress whose glamorous live takes a very unfortunate turn after she accidentally kills her director boyfriend for cheating on her.  Her bad fortune worsens after she is released from her 6 years in prison and returns home to find out that the industry that once loved her wants nothing more to do with her. Things get further complicated when bad health forces Abynah to retire to a village. And in her attempt to escape the harsh realities she is facing, she finds hope and reason to fight again in a stranger who happens to be an adherent fan of hers in her glory days.

Anyone would certainly agree that this is indeed a BEAUTIFUL story. Having fame is one thing, losing it all is another thing. And this movie gives us a peek at what it could all feel like. This screenplay from Eddie Nartey tells a story a lot of people, not just celebrities or the famous can relate to in one way or the other. And it gives you that rude awakening that we all need once in a while.

The movie starts off with a strong opening scene with a movie production set that has Director Eddie Nartey in-character as Director KK (boyfriend to Abynah). He has proved to us time without number his caliber as an actor and this was no exemption. We seem to think his performance in the opening scene sort of set a standard for the other cast in this movie to try to meet; and it worked.  Overall the acting in this movie was very good. Christabel Ekah’s interpretation of both the glamorous and turbulent aspects of Abynah’s live was flawless and she owned the lead role exactly like she was supposed to do. We also noticed Umar Krupp stand out in his scenes to the delight and admiration of the audience.  We were also happy seeing one of our legends, Fred Amugi in this movie. He proved that age does come with experience and he reaffirmed that our greats in this industry should never be forgotten.

We loved how the script made sufficient use of Twi (with English subtitles) in the dialogue for some parts of the village scenes. That added good amounts of humor to the almost too serious situations and the audience appreciated and enjoyed that.

We also loved how the story seemed to drop subliminal hints at the negatives of smoking and how hazardous it is to our health.

We were not too happy with some of the production elements. Regardless of the good cinematography used in this movie, we feel some of the shots were poorly executed. There were a couple of scenes that had the camera frames shaking when they needed to be steady. We also noticed that the sound had a lot of unnecessary feedback and interference from surrounding elements on the set. Although some natural sound effects where used to sort of blur out these bad feedback, this wasn’t perfectly executed so it rendered some parts of the dialogue almost inaudible. This did not take anything away from the quality of the dialogue and it’s execution from the cast but we would expect that EN Entertainment do a better job in the sound department.

Although we loved this script we still feel that some more could have been done to add some depth to certain aspects of the story. Like what actually happened to Abynah in prison.

We also noticed that a lot of the audience did not like how the story ended regardless of the very good unexpected twist it had at the end.

Overall this movie does a good job of keeping you interested from start to finish. It was easy to follow and not too complicated to leave the viewer lost or wondering what happened. GhMoviefreak would like to rate this movie 6.5/10.

This movie does a great job of reminding you not to give up regardless of what situation you find yourself in and also how quickly things can take a turn for the worse when we fail to appreciate and hold on to the beautiful things that live blesses us with.

Struggle takes us places but if you ever find yourself in a beautiful situation don’t ruin it.

Do well to go see this movie if you haven’t and feel free to share with us your thoughts, views, comments or opinions in the comments section  below.

Watch Trailer here