From Ochre Moving Pictures, the producers of Justice Served and Fatal Seduction, comes Soon Comes Night, the latest South African Netflix series. Directed by Thabang Moleya and Sanele Zulu, Soon Comes Night is an action thriller about a pseudo-revolutionary who believes his own PR. Former freedom fighter Alex Shabane, played remarkably by Kwenzo Ngcobo (The Wife), just can’t stop robbing CIT (cash-in-transit) trucks. Somehow, ‘the people’ look up to him as some kind of modern-day Robin Hood.
The whole show is set in 2000, for reasons still unclear to me. This is hardly worth dissecting because what feels like half the series is dedicated to flashbacks from 1984, 1991, etc. The show has a clear fixation on history and politics, which reminded me of Justice Served. While I lauded Justice Served on a technical level, I did lament its shortcomings, like its desire to appear politically relevant without actually being so. Similarly, in Soon Comes Night, talk of freedom and bloodshed for peace falls on deaf ears for the audience because it’s always in the past tense, events and suffering we are not privy to. Then, the use of flashbacks, which one would expect to be a solution to this problem, alas, is not. Even in the flashbacks, all that happens is thuggery and talk of freedom.
Revisit our review of ‘Justice Served’ here.
All of this, of course, could be by design. Indeed, even Shabane’s apparent love turns her back on him at a certain point. He’s gone too far. He kills innocent men—fathers of children—and steals from the people themselves. He may be the biggest hypocrite in African television yet. By design, right? Possibly. But I find that hard to reconcile with the B story of the show, that of the detectives and police force, which comes complete with flashbacks of their own. You get a flashback. And you get a flashback. Everybody gets a flashback here. Even dead policemen apparently died for freedom. Here, it’s the leading cause of death.
The B story, sometimes more and sometimes less compelling than the tale of Shabane, is uneven and backpedals constantly. Every character in this show is informed by their past. They have no excitement unto themselves. Take, for instance, the character of Sakkie, played by Albert Pretorius, who boasts the saddest face on earth. The whole time, he’s hung up on the fact that he killed his own son in a car accident and the fact that his wife left him over it. It’s all utterly pointless to the story at hand. The time afforded it does not justify the cause: to humanise the Afrikaans cop. By the end, they play the classic detective-finally-comes-face-to-face-with-the-criminal trope, where they stare at one another and call each other by their full government names. It usually has a tremendous effect after six episodes of television. But in Soon Comes Night, one feels nothing. Perhaps they should’ve moved on ahead and then showed it to us in one of those flashbacks they labour so lovingly over.
Despite my deep qualms with what this show represents and how it was written, it does have a vaguely interesting streak of intrigue. The fact, as mentioned before, of the characters on the sidelines knowing and being frustrated with the very same thing this audience member was—Shabane ultimately being full of shit—doesn’t help solve the problem that he is the show’s lead. The lead refuses to grow or change or be interesting, even when his supporting characters beg him to. It’s almost self-aware. Almost.
The performances are competent, the biggest problem being not even in the scripts themselves but the total conception of the story. Dippy Padi is humorous as Pearl, the girlfriend turned informant. Mavuso Simelane is moving as Moskov, Alex’s one friend who tells him the truth.
Ultimately, Soon Comes Night is essentially the story of a schizophrenic thug, just another run-of-the-mill Netflix show. It’s vaguely entertaining, but it’s not particularly worth your time if you happen to hold your time in high regard. Major spoiler alert: When Alex Shabane finally dies at the end, he dies for the freedom of the audience.
Soon Comes Night is streaming on Netflix.
