Tatuma (Rahama Sadau) is given to her mother by the gods and the plan is to sacrifice her to them after a few years but when she turns 5, her mother begs a priest to take her away from the village. Tatuma grows up in a convent but is still haunted by her past through dreams and the constant voices she hears. She's convinced that she needs to find out who she is and understand why she has a strange tatu on her chest. If I'm being totally honest, I didn't want to see Tatu because I felt it was going to look like those old scary Nollywood films, but I decided to give it a try. The film plot isn't something fresh or different and I felt they did an average job with the execution. I get that maybe they were trying to blend the cinematography with the dark theme of the film but I really struggled to see because of how dark it was. I could only grasp three of four of the names of the characters mostly because I couldn't hear most of what the Chief Priest (Segun Arinze) was saying. I found his voice to be too piercing and I wish they toned it down a bit. For more than half of the film, I didn't understand what was going on.
There was a scene with Saka which I felt was a total waste of screen time. It could have been shorter, he was doing too much and it started getting annoying. The audience seemed to love it because they kept giggling at everything he said. A very obvious error was when Tatu made a rope with the bed sheets. How was she able to do that so quickly? Wally and Tatuma had sex a night before and suddenly she's pregnant the next day? How is that even possible? There was also a scene with Wally (Gabriel Afolayan) getting beat up by 4 dwarfs, I'm sure they were trying to make the audience laugh but it was a very unnecessary scene mostly because it was collided with a scene that was meant to be "the climax". The ending was also very confusing and I'm not sure it was a good enough conclusion to the story. Tatu and Wally baptize their baby in a stream in the village? Does that mean they ended up getting married and staying in the village? They also didn't show us what became of the Chief Priest (Segun Arinze) or did he just disappear? They did a very good job with the set and the cast played their roles really well especially Rahama Sadau who I fell in love with after seeing Hakkunde. Gabriel Afolayan's Wally was also a great comic relief. There's nothing original or exciting about the plot and I think it's an average movie. Have you seen Tatu? Let me know what you think about it?
RATING-5/10
BASED ON "TATU" BY Dr. Abraham Nwakwo
SCREENPLAY Jude Idada, Don Omope,
DIRECTOR Don Omope
STARRING Segun Arinze, Desmond Elliot, Sambasa Nzeribe, Rahama Sadau, Gabriel Afolayan, Toyin Abraham, Funlola Aofiyebi-Raimi
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