Once in a while, I do watch Nigerian movies. It’s a once-in-a-while thing because, let’s be honest, a good number of them are low-key low-budget with storylines that feel like they’ve been recycled more times than I can count. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t well-scripted and well-directed Nigerian movies hiding amongst the others.
Anyway, the one I saw recently had been sitting on my list for a while until I started seeing clips of it trending on Nigerian-Tok. So I thought, okay, this is probably a good time to finally watch it, especially since I needed something to temporarily take my mind off the realities of life. I also watched it because it was produced by my fave, Uche Montana. She is one of those actresses I genuinely enjoy watching because she eats up her roles. But whenever she’s paired with relatively unfamiliar faces, I always need a little convincing before I trust the process. 😂
The Story
The film opens in a rather unusual way, with a young Beatrice (Nadia Buari) discovering that she is pregnant. Her mother takes her to a prophet, who gives her a disturbing warning about the pregnancy.
Fast-forward 28 years, and that unborn child is now Thelma (Uche Montana), a grown woman preparing to marry Kayode (Maurice Sam). And everything seems to be moving along nicely until Thelma discovers something that completely destroys the picture she has of the two people closest to her. Her mother and her fiancé.
I’ll stop there because the less you know about the actual revelation before watching, the better.
What follows isn’t simply a story about cheating. It becomes a story about betrayal, resentment, emotional neglect, envy and the kind of family dysfunction that can remain buried for years until one terrible decision brings everything to the surface.
My Thoughts and Rating
This was absolutely not the family drama I expected. I won’t lie, the premise had my flabbers gasted. Like her mother? Her fiancé? Because there are betrayals and then there are betrayals that make you question whether the writers were sitting in a room thinking of the most emotionally damaging thing they could possibly do to one character. And of course, Thelma gets hit with one of those.
Imagine preparing to marry someone you love, trusting your mother, believing you understand your family, only to discover that the two people you’ve placed your trust in have been keeping something from you that fundamentally changes how you see both of them. That’s not just heartbreak, it is an emotional demolition.
Now let me talk about Uche Montana because she was Really Good Here
This is probably where my bias towards Uche Montana gets justified. She carried Thelma’s emotional journey quite well. What I liked was that she didn’t play Thelma as someone who was simply angry because the plot required her to be angry. You can actually see the character trying to process the different layers of what has happened to her.
There is the betrayal from Kayode, then there’s the betrayal from her mother and underneath both is the devastating realisation that perhaps the people she thought she knew were never quite who she believed them to be.
Montana gives Thelma enough vulnerability without turning her into a permanently crying character, which I appreciated.
Also, Nadia Buari Was Probably the Biggest Surprise for Me
I have to give Nadia her flowers because Beatrice could have easily become a one-note villain but she doesn’t.
The more we understand about Beatrice, the more complicated her character becomes. She’s bitter, lonely, and is carrying years of emotional disappointment. Instead of dealing with those feelings in a healthy way, she allows them to grow into resentment, particularly towards the daughter whose life seems to be going in a direction she herself never got to experience.
That doesn’t excuse her behaviour. Not even remotely. But I found myself trying to understand how someone could become so consumed by their own unhappiness that they end up destroying the happiness of someone they should be protecting. Now that’s what made Beatrice uncomfortable to watch. She isn’t evil for the sake of being evil, she’s just deeply unhappy and she makes other people pay for it.
And Kayode… Sir, What Were You Thinking?
Maurice Sam plays Kayode with the calmness of someone who knows how to appear trustworthy, which makes the eventual betrayal even more irritating. That’s actually one thing the film gets right.
The people who hurt us aren’t always obviously terrible people. Most often they’re the person who looks you in the eye every day. That’s why Thelma’s situation feels so devastating. She isn’t simply losing a relationship, she’s osing her understanding of the people around her.
What stayed with me most wasn’t even the scandal. It was the resentment underneath it. Beatrice seems to look at her daughter’s life and see everything she believes she was denied. That made me think about how dangerous unresolved pain can become when someone refuses to deal with it.
There is a difference between being hurt by life and deciding that everyone else must suffer because you were hurt. Beatrice crossed that line. Unfortunately, Thelma became the person standing closest when she did.
The film therefore becomes more than “mother sleeps with daughter’s fiancé.” That is obviously the headline-grabbing part, but underneath it is a story about a woman who allowed disappointment to become bitterness and bitterness to become destruction.
Now, I enjoyed the film, but I am not going to pretend everything was perfect. The movie occasionally tells me exactly what I’m supposed to feel instead of trusting the performances to get me there.
There are also parts of the story that feel very familiar if you’ve watched enough Nollywood family dramas. The overbearing parent, the troubled past, the betrayal, the secrets finally coming out, these aren’t exactly new ingredients.
But the performances give those familiar elements enough emotional weight to keep the film engaging. I also loved that it wasn’t just about the affair. This is probably my favourite thing about the movie. The affair is just the hook and the emotional consequences are the actual story.
What happens to Thelma afterwards is far more interesting than the revelation itself because how do you rebuild yourself when the people who broke you are people you cannot simply erase from your life? How do you trust again? How do you separate the person you were before the betrayal from the person you become afterwards? Most importantly, how do you refuse to let somebody else’s dysfunction become your own?
Those are the questions I found myself thinking about while watching.
All in all, this film is not without its flaws. There are familiar Nollywood tropes here and moments when the drama feels a little too deliberately heightened. But I still enjoyed it.
It had enough emotional conflict to keep me interested, and I genuinely wanted to see how Thelma would navigate the mess that had been dumped on her.
And honestly, Nadia Buari and Uche Montana were the heart of this movie for me. One portrayed what years of disappointment can turn a person into, the other showed what it looks like to be wounded by someone else’s choices and still find your way back to yourself.
The longest journey isn’t getting somewhere. It’s finding your way back to yourself after the people you trusted most have made you question everything you thought you knew.
Rating: 7.5/10.
