Elesin Oba' explores Soyinka's 4th stage but it's not the deep film it pretends to be [Pulse Review

Elesin Oba' explores Soyinka's 4th stage but it's not the deep film it pretends to be [Pulse Review

The film premiered on Netflix on November 4, 2022.

Tragic drama, to use literary terminology, is a type of drama in which audience members experience catharsis while witnessing a display of human suffering. Tragic storytelling as we know it in Western culture dates back to roughly 2,500 years ago in ancient Greece.has changed over the centuries and has been a significant part of numerous cultures and historical periods, including the Roman Republic, Elizabethan England, and modern times.

Numerous literary academics have offered various definitions of the term "tragic play." A play or drama with a depressing ending is how tragedy is typically classified as a type of drama, both informally and by laypeople.

A detailed examination of tragedy via the prism of its inception; in Greek or classical literature, tragedy may be defined as a play in verse with a causally related chain of events in which the protagonist is tested, which typically results in a disastrous ending.

Even while the origins of classical and contemporary tragedies may change, the outcome is always the same: a person suffers a tragedy. The idea of tragedy is communal for Wole Soyinka and the African tragedy postulations through the theory of the 4th stage and the mysteries of Ogun, and that is what Biyi Bandele's Elesin Oba examines, even though it comes from Soyinka's source material

Odunlade Adekola plays the King's Horseman, who must take his own life in order to join the King in the afterlife, keep him company, and clear a path for him so he won't wreak havoc on the world.

The three planes of existence—the world of the living, the world of the dead, and the world of the unborn—must work in harmony, in accordance with Soyinka's 4th Stage idea. The unborn and the living will both suffer if the dead do not transition.

This rite of passage must be completed, and there must be a constant flow. But this time, the Elesin has refused to die due to lust-induced blindness.

His sexual temperament hinders the process of transitioning until a British commander, Simon Pilkings (Mark Elderkin), interferes with the rite and calls it savage, putting the locals in peril.