The out­skirts of Lagos, 1993: a har­ried father, Fola (Sope Dirisu), return­ing to his tum­ble­down home, makes the snap deci­sion to scoop up his two bored, pre-teen sons and take them on a road trip into cen­tral Lagos to col­lect wages owed to him. He has an ulte­ri­or motive: so they may all be at ground zero when the results of a nation­al elec­tion are announced and, all being well, M. K. O. Abi­o­la will tri­umph over the rul­ing mil­i­tary jun­ta and bring democ­ra­cy and order back to Nigeria. 

He pro­ceeds with an ele­ment of cau­tion, know­ing that he has for too long been an absent father, earn­ing mon­ey from a far-flung fac­to­ry job (so he tells the boys) but has actu­al­ly been moon­light­ing as a polit­i­cal lob­by­ist for Abi­o­la. His duty of care extends to mak­ing sure that his sons have a bet­ter future, and in many ways this affect­ing and beau­ti­ful­ly-judged first fea­ture from Aki­no­la Davies Jr is about a father want­i­ng his kids to see first hand the fruits of his (often dan­ger­ous) labours and under­stand that he has been there for them on a nation­al lev­el, even if he hasn’t on a pri­vate one.

This entire review could be ded­i­cat­ed to the immense cen­tral per­for­mance by Sope Dirisu who, as the eter­nal­ly con­flict­ed father, is with­hold­ing a lot of infor­ma­tion from his fam­i­ly for their safe­ty. He also seems to have to alter per­sonas with every new per­son he encoun­ters. Ini­tial­ly, he’s a stern father who wants his boys (incred­i­bly nat­ur­al and fun­ny per­for­mances by Chibuike Mar­velous Egbo and God­win Egbo) to under­stand a bit more about the coun­try they’re liv­ing in, but per­haps not too much.

Soon he becomes the des­per­ate grafter who urgent­ly needs wages for upkeep; then he’s the shady polit­i­cal oper­a­tive who peo­ple refer to as ​“Kapo” as he tucks a few notes in their pock­et for sur­vival. One thing’s for cer­tain: he’s a piv­otal, well-liked pres­ence in the cap­i­tal, empha­sised by the fact that rov­ing mil­i­tary police can’t stop star­ing at him as if they recog­nise him from somewhere

The first half of the film com­pris­es a sur­vey of Lagos in the 1990s, and through a land­scape of severe socioe­co­nom­ic con­trasts he is able to give his sons a sense of the uphill bat­tle that they face. They begin to see signs of the life he lives in the city, and some­times the sur­vival tac­tics he uses cut through his self-paint­ed image as a right­eous fam­i­ly man. 

At the cen­tre of a film is a dia­logue scene on a beach in which the father leaves him­self open for ques­tion­ing and is able to impart both his wis­dom and attempt to furtive­ly cul­ti­vate a sense of nation­al pride in his inquis­i­tive off­spring. Dirisu chan­nels ten­der­ness, but his indig­na­tion con­stant­ly bub­bles beneath the sur­face. Yet their con­ver­sa­tion is cut short by a gang of maraud­ers sud­den­ly hack­ing chunks off of a beached whale, and the film con­stant­ly leans on the inter­play between the pro­tag­o­nists and the strange things occur­ring in the backdrop.

The direc­tion by Davies Jr is absolute­ly top-notch, not just how he is able to cap­ture the fine nuances of the actors on cam­era, but also how they are immersed into the chaot­ic melée of Lagos at this pow­derkeg moment. The plot ends up hing­ing on some strange coin­ci­dences in its final stretch, and the end­ing per­haps with­holds a lit­tle too much detail for it’s on good, but oth­er­wise this is a very fine pic­ture on a for­mal and emo­tion­al level. 

The film played as part of the Un Cer­tain Regard strand at the 2025 Cannes Film Fes­ti­val, and could’ve very much held its own in the main competition.

To keep cel­e­brat­ing the craft of film, we have to rely on the sup­port of our mem­bers. Join Club LWLies today and receive access to a host of benefits.