REVIEW: ‘A Sunday Affair’ Is A Messy One, For Better And Worse

Directed by Walter Taylaur, A Sunday Affair is a Nigerian Netflix Original romance about two best friends, Toyin (Dakore Akande) and Uche (Nse Ikpe-Etim), vying after the same married man, Sunday (Oris Erhuero). But where Uche is just excited to be having sex with another hot married man, Toyin might actually be falling in love. Sunday, of course, is confounded because what would a love triangle be without a confounded man in the middle of it?

A Sunday Affair is, foremost, a mess. And I mean mess in the good way. It’s a mess in the bad way, too, with a generally disinteresting script and one of the most out of nowhere second halves and twist endings I can remember. But mostly, it’s a chaotic mess. It’s cheating on cheating on cheating, but where cheating is the point and not (for the most part) a big moral quagmire. The initial infidelity, Sunday cheating on his wife, is brushed away quickly for both Toyin and Uche. Sunday is also Uche’s sister’s husband’s brother. They and Toyin met at their wedding. Meanwhile, Uche has a “wealthy benefactor” supporting her art gallery and some other extracurricular business. It’s a mess!

It’s just not always especially fun mess. At first, it’s nice that Uche and Sunday are carnal and Toyin and Uche are careful—it makes Sunday seem like he’s maybe different from the standard philanderer. But then there somehow manages to feel like neither enough sex nor enough romance. It’s all broken up by too much lamentation and moping on basically everyone’s part over some period of the movie or another. I appreciate the conceit of the movie and its total messiness; I just don’t think it lives up to its full potential.

This is probably because a little more than halfway through the movie, the tone does a complete and utter 180. Where nothing felt serious for the first half, suddenly, circumstances become dire. And because of the tone switch seemingly out of nowhere, all of the fun that was being had comes to a screeching halt in exchange for downright drama and tragedy. It’s hard to feel completely committed to the swing after spending the first half in such a different mood. The second half is perfectly fine; I could even see it being pretty effective if it wasn’t coming hot off the heels of something just so completely messy. By the time the movie comes to its conclusion, it leaves behind more whiplash than anything else, even if neither of its halves are good or bad.

In the end, A Sunday Affair is a messy movie in every sense of the world. It’s basically two completely different movies in one, with a heck of a lot of chaos in the first half and a massive shift in tone to drama and tragedy in the second. Neither half is especially good or bad, and on the whole, the movie is as fine as it gets.

A Sunday Affair is streaming now on Netflix.