Straight to the point, the just-released teaser for Kemi Adetiba’s sophomore film King of Boys is inscrutable. I have seen it like three times, during which I’m transported to my childhood trips to the amusement park’s House of Horror, where it’s gleefully dark, taunting, and claustrophobic. In the meagre 30 seconds, the teaser uses copious amounts of inexplicable dread and fluttering lights, and looks like something ostensibly shot in a room.
It’s a darkly interesting tableau Kemi Adetiba has set out for us though. One of the film’s cast members Sola Sobowale sits oddly immobilised in a chair, as if she’s playing a staring game. Another cast member, a male whose face is lost in the dizzyingly fluctuating frames, sits in the same way as Sobowale. Are we supposed to be scared? Is there a clue in the teaser that we must look for? Kemi Adetiba isn’t known for yoking this kind of aesthetic. Building on an healthy, agile body of music-video work and the pop-culturally successful romantic comedy The Wedding Party, Adetiba’s directorial technique has been linear and clear-cut.
With meandering Instagram posts from the director that started since January, and the ominous hashtag #KingIsComing, Adetiba is very much in control of the press run for King of Boys. But we do know that it’s star-studded (eye-roll), and will also feature popular rappers Ill Bliss and Reminisce in their debut movie roles. You can check out the teaser below.
When Bernard Dayo isn’t writing about pop culture, he’s watching horror movies and reading comics and trying to pretend his addiction to Netflix isn’t a serious condition.
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