Nedbank ‘Money Relationships’

Darling Films’ Zee Ntuli turns Money into a man for Nedbank’s ‘Money Relationships’.

Created by Joe Public, Nedbank’s new campaign uses the language of a psychological thriller to explore the emotional hold money can have over our lives.
Darling Films director Zee Ntuli approached Joe Public’s Money Relationships for Nedbank as a psychological thriller. Casting, blocking, reflections and a score built from the sounds of money all work towards the same thing. Hiding the reveal in plain sight.

Sam is doing well when Ben enters his life. Charismatic, generous and quietly enabling, Ben makes success feel easier and Sam feel more powerful. Ben is Money.
The challenge was making that reveal feel inevitable without letting the audience see it coming. Ben couldn’t arrive looking like trouble. The casting had to make you want him around. He needed to feel seductive, confident, useful. Someone who makes Sam feel sharper simply by being close to him. The film pulls us into that seduction first, before allowing the relationship to become invasive. Building on Joe Public’s original concept, Ntuli made Money more active inside Sam’s world.

Ben opens doors. Hands him keys. Dresses him. Gets him through ropes and into private spaces. He doesn’t just accompany Sam through his success. He physically and emotionally enables it. That idea found its way into the blocking.
Working closely with cinematographer Adam Bentel, Ntuli carried that thinking into the camera language and composition. Doors, lifts, gates and thresholds recur throughout the film. Ben is often the person moving Sam through them. Money, quite literally, opens doors. Later those same ideas start to turn. Access becomes intrusion. Ben begins appearing in increasingly private parts of Sam’s life. Reflections quietly do another job. Mirrors, windows and polished surfaces keep Ben’s presence slightly uncertain. Sometimes Sam appears in a reflection while Ben does not. Nothing is announced. The clues simply sit there.

Production designer William Boyes helped build those opportunities into the spaces themselves, giving the visual idea somewhere to live without drawing attention to it. The compositions shift too. As Ben occupies more of Sam’s attention, his wife starts losing space inside the frame. Foreground, background, who Sam faces, who he turns away from. Small changes in blocking let the relationship deteriorate visually before the story needs to spell it out. The same approach applies to the score.

Working with Chris Snyman on the music and sound design, the team built the score from sounds associated with money.
Coins, money counters, card-machine beeps, gambling sounds and the stock exchange bell became raw material for the music. They were stretched, buried and distorted until their origins almost disappeared.

So Money is sitting inside the soundtrack from the beginning too.

As Sam starts to unravel, the score follows. Rhythm slips. Textures distort. The music becomes less settled, then strips back for the final reveal.
Much of the film’s unease was created practically through casting, performance, staging, cinematography, production design, sound and edit. The craft is doing the revealing long before the story does. Produced in South Africa by Darling Films, Money Relationships takes a strong conceptual idea and lets the filmmaking carry it. By the time Ben disappears, the clues have been there for us all along.

At its centre is one simple question.
What is your relationship with money?