Night of the Kings (2020)
★★ — Night of the Kings (2020)
The premise alone had me. A young prisoner thrown into Ivory Coast's most notorious maximum-security jail, La Maca, told he must spin a story from dusk until sunrise or face death. It's Scheherazade by way of the prison yard. It's folklore as a weapon. For the first twenty minutes or so, I was completely gripped.
And fair play to the filmmakers for the audacity of the setting. La Maca was shot inside a real prison, with real inmates involved, and you feel it. Every shadow, every sweat-slicked face, every hushed corner of that courtyard crackles with something raw and unnerving. The golden-hour light turns the prison walls into something almost sacred, faces caught in frames that wouldn't look out of place in a Renaissance painting. Visually, this film is genuinely stunning.
Which makes what follows all the more frustrating.
Our reluctant storyteller, Roman, begins spinning the tale of Zama King, a mythical gang leader, and that's where the wheels start to wobble. His delivery is meandering at best. There's repetition that feels unintentional rather than ritualistic, pacing that stalls and sputters, a narrative that wanders off and forgets to come back. I kept waiting for the story to tighten, for the grip to return. It never really does.
And then there's the inmates. Every time Roman finds a rhythm, the assembled crowd breaks into these strange performative interludes. A man crouches and moves like a scorpion. Others act out scenes in ways that blur the line between theatre and fever dream. I understand what the film is going for here, this idea that storytelling is communal, that the audience becomes the story. But in practice it just feels chaotic, and not the productive kind of chaos. It's chaos that dissipates tension rather than builds it.
The film's central problem is that it can't make up its mind what it wants to be. Is it a psychological thriller about survival? A fable rooted in West African folklore? A meditation on power and myth within a brutal institution? It reaches for all three simultaneously and, in doing so, loses its footing on all of them. The climax, a quiet and almost wordless sequence where Roman's fate turns on whether the sun rises before he finishes his tale, should be devastating. Instead it lands with a strange hollowness, arriving too quickly and carrying too little weight given everything that preceded it.
I don't want to be entirely dismissive, because there's genuine ambition here and genuine craft in individual moments. The concept of weaving folklore into a story about survival and power within a closed, violent world is rich with possibility. The film clearly has something to say about how stories function as currency, as armour, as a way of maintaining order and identity when everything else has been stripped away. That's worth saying. I just wish the script had found a cleaner, more disciplined way to say it.
Style, as good as it is here, only carries you so far. And two stars feels about right. One for the daring of the idea, one for the extraordinary visual work. The execution, though, is where it all comes undone.
Part of my A-Z World Movie Tour, with the Ivory Coast ticked off the list. Onwards.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 2020 | Watched: 2025-07-03
Where to watch
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