Off a lonely forest road in Taiwo Egunjobi’s mystery and historical drama A Green Fever, a man carries his sick daughter and seemingly chances upon a compound deep in the forest. There are soldiers, suggesting that they are guarding something valuable there. On the radio, we learn there is a curfew and that the country is in a fragile state. Imploring, the man and his daughter are let in by a young woman, who is both suspicious of him and concerned for his daughter. Slowly, through dialogue and radio broadcasts, details emerge: it is a country under military rule, the house is owned by a secretive but brutal colonel, and a coup may be underway. That, however, may not be the main concern of the man.
A Green Fever succeeds in its suspense: its ability to keep the viewer guessing and anticipating. Kolade Morakinyo’s sound editing is efficient and Gray Jones Ossai’s score is beautiful and I wish that the song demo by the mistress could be released.
Temilolu Fosudo’s mystery guest Kunmi plays off the naivete of Ruby P. Okezie’s colonel’s mistress Matilda, a woman trapped by a man, her dreams of music dashed. He circles her gullibility. But there are moments when Isaac Ayodeji’s otherwise tight script — Kunmi’s “I can’t have coffee in the house of a man that wants me dead” response, his illogical risk-taking given that he has his sick daughter with him — and, mostly, Fosudo’s performance itself — his Kunmi’s general weirdness, his pretense that he doesn’t know what he’s saying, his eyes in the scene where he asks for Panasonic in the passage, his generally confident behaviour in laughing with a colonel’s mistress — almost give away his intention. There are also times when the characters veer from logic, like when William Benson’s Colonel Basiru reveals the nature of his mistress’s miscarriage right in front of a man he suspects of being a spy.
Time attends story in Egunjobi’s films: in All Na Vibes, it is the unbroken present, and in A Green Fever, it is a countdown of history. In that grand sense, one sees Kunmi’s presence as an unlikely intervention in the fate of a nation. Egunjobi’s direction keeps the story open-ended and his visual style is accentuated by the production design. The camera placement in the forest may be why the film starts and ends the same way: like a tunnel, inviting you to follow the story, counting down. ♦
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