The execution of Devil is a Liar is formulaic, recycling tropes we have seen countless times and delivering them without the urgency or freshness needed to make them compelling.
By Joseph Jonathan
Characters who pass through great ordeals are a staple in Nollywood, beloved from the Old Nollywood era up until now. This reflects the human penchant for stories of success and resilience—whether grass to grace, grace to grass, or grace to grass and back again.
Cinema has long served as a sanctuary for such narratives, where audiences witness lives wrecked and reassembled. The pleasure lies not only in watching a fall but in anticipating the rise. Viewers almost seem to demand it, perhaps because in a society defined by instability and endurance, stories of resilience mirror their own.
Devil is a Liar, released on Netflix and directed by Moses Inwang, positions itself within this tradition, promising the tale of a woman who loses everything and must claw her way back. It follows Adaora Phillips (Nse Ikpe-Etim), a successful woman in her late thirties who, despite professional triumphs, is haunted by the pressures of marriage.
Society whispers its disapproval of her singlehood, her family eyes her with expectation, and she herself cannot shake the sense that her achievements are incomplete without a husband. When she finally weds Jaiye (James Gardiner), the picture seems perfect: love, companionship, stability. But perfection in cinema—especially in Nollywood—is rarely allowed to last.
Soon, Adaora’s life is torn apart by betrayal, manipulation, and devastation. She is stripped of the very things she once believed anchored her. The rest of the film charts her attempts at survival, rebuilding, and revenge.
On paper, this is fertile ground for a character-driven psychological drama: a meditation on how love can corrode into abuse, on the fragility of identity when tethered to societal expectations, and on the resilience required to rebuild from ruin.
Indeed, the official synopsis hints at precisely this — but that is not the film we are given. Instead, Devil is a Liar reveals itself to be impatient with introspection, uninterested in Adaora’s inner weather. It races instead towards a more familiar destination: revenge as narrative catharsis.
It is here that the film falters most significantly. Adaora’s trauma becomes less a story to be explored than a justification for vengeance to be enacted. The emotional terrain of her suffering — the psychological fragmentation, the slow corrosion of confidence, the nuanced dance between victimhood and agency — is largely bypassed.
The film seems to say: yes, she suffers, but more importantly, wait until she gets even. While it is true that the devil is a liar, this film lies to itself about the story it is telling. It promises a tale of brokenness but delivers instead a morality play of retribution. In this sense, it is reminiscent of Tyler Perry’s cinema, where character pain often serves as a detour en route to a climactic comeuppance. One could swap Adaora and Jaiye for characters in several of Perry’s films, and little would be lost in translation.
At the centre of this uneven project is Nse Ikpe-Etim, an actress of considerable range who here finds herself both essential and unsupported. Even Superman needs the Justice League, and Thor, the Avengers; it is no surprise, then, that Ikpe-Etim struggles to carry the entire weight of a poorly written narrative.
She infuses Adaora with dignity and vulnerability, but the script affords her little oxygen. Scenes that should simmer with suppressed tension fizzle into bland exchanges, and pivotal emotional beats are undercut by dialogue that sounds more like paraphrased clichés than revelations of character.
Her co-lead, James Gardiner, fares worse. As Jaiye, the man whose supposed love curdles into betrayal, he is undone by an accent that distracts more than it convinces and by a performance that feels perpetually self-conscious. At times, one does not see Jaiye the character but Gardiner the actor — straining, and failing, to conceal the effort of trying. His romantic scenes with Ikpe-Etim lack chemistry, registering instead as rehearsed demonstrations of affection.
The result is a central relationship that never quite feels authentic, which in turn makes Adaora’s devastation less searing than it ought to have been. The supporting cast, too, delivers performances that rarely rise above serviceable. They appear less as people inhabiting roles than as actors reciting lines.
Beyond performance, Devil is a Liar gestures towards themes that could have anchored it in something more compelling. It acknowledges, for instance, the intense pressure Nigerian women face to marry before a certain age, as though professional accomplishments count for little beside the ring on a finger.
It briefly touches on the unease surrounding relationships in which the woman is older than the man or earns more, tapping into entrenched gender insecurities. It hints at female autonomy — the right to determine the course of one’s body, career, and life without external interference.
Yet these issues are introduced only to be abandoned, raised as if in passing, like a status update — glanced at and forgotten. The effect is not of a film interrogating social realities but of one vaguely acknowledging them, as if to say, “We know these problems exist” — and nothing more.
Even on the level of technical craft, Devil is a Liar struggles. The sound design is perhaps its most glaring flaw. At several points, the subtitles announce lines the audience cannot hear, the audio apparently lost or mismatched in post-production. Voices often seem dubbed in a distant studio, creating a dissonance between lip movement and sound.
Conversations sound hollow, their emotional resonance drained by the very technology meant to capture them. This makes the already flat dialogue feel even more artificial, as though sincerity itself had been filtered out. The film’s pacing does it no favours either. At 2 hrs 17 mins, it drags through predictable events, stretching moments that do not need elongation while rushing past those that require attention.
To be fair, there is ambition behind Devil is a Liar. It clearly set out to tell a story of betrayal and redemption, one designed to resonate with audiences’ appetite for endurance and justice. But the execution is formulaic, recycling tropes we have seen countless times and delivering them without the urgency or freshness needed to make them compelling.
What should have been a layered exploration of trauma and resilience collapses into a predictable revenge fantasy. By the time the credits roll, what lingers is not the complexity of Adaora’s journey but the sense of a film that mistook catharsis for depth.
In the end, the devil’s biggest lie is not whispered within the story but enacted by the film itself: the lie that it has something new to say. It does not. It recycles, it flattens, it shortcuts. Audiences familiar with Nollywood’s long fascination with ordeals will recognise the beats before they arrive — and will find little reward in waiting for them.
Rating: 1.6/5
Joseph Jonathan is a historian who seeks to understand how film shapes our cultural identity as a people. He believes that history is more about the future than the past. When he’s not writing about film, you can catch him listening to music or discussing politics. He tweets @chukwu2big.