Movie Review: Champagne Room (2016)

*Full disclosure I am friends with the director, in fact I interviewed him a while back for the site and you can check that out here, but rest assured you can expect me to be impartial and honest as always.

Champagne Room is a movie written and directed by Olumide Fadeyibi, and produced by Gtown Media Productions and Turn Flicks. It stars Sodi Ojewuyi, Amanda Marment, Tony Osy, Ray Crofter, Omon Balogun, Susan Sutton, Mobolaji Alakija and Anastasia Ashiagbor just to name a few. 

The movie starts off really strong, with a lot of excitement, I mean we have drugs, money and a cop raid, and it only gets more interesting from there. That being said, Champagne Room isn’t just your typical action affair, it’s a rich and complex story, that has a lot going for it. To expand on that a little, human trafficking and other tragedies such as domestic violence and child abuse are at the core of this movie and it doesn’t pull any punches in portraying these topics. It’s also a very people driven narrative, with a strong and fresh cast of actors, who don’t struggle to play complex characters from all walks of life. 

Champagne Room is well paced, blending the various stories present together to create something that’s truly engaging, and while the movie is full of very heavy plot, and deals with various harsh unforgiving realities of modern life, you don’t just come away feeling sad, because it’s not just designed to make you sad, instead it serves to educate the viewer than these things still happen. 

Something that occurred to me while watching, I hope that in the future in my own career as a journalist that I am half as good as Igwe, because his tenacity and dedication are something that we as journalists should strive for, and that he was willing to do it without protection of the freedoms that we in this country take for granted but aren’t available in other countries. He was willing to speak his mind when expressing views against what the government/authorities believe or are disseminating to the public can get you killed.

I often get really emotionally invested in the movies that I watch, if it’s a sad movie then I’ll cry, and if it’s a happy movie, then I’ll laugh and I have to admit that Champagne Room had me tearing up at certain moments. A good example of this was a scene early on where a group of girls discover that they have been brought here to work in the sex trade, the ripples of shock and sadness which passed over the group really hit me hard.

Overall Champagne Room is a very good film, one that’s deeply emotional, and it strikes a chord from the first moment to the last. I look forward to seeing more from Olumide and his crew in the future. Anyway I give this movie a 4/5 and strongly urge you to go check it out for yourself on YouTube where it is available for free.

First Published on: https://offtherecordblog.org/

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