For those who thought a messiah was needed in Nollywood, there was a time in the early 2010s when it seemed like Kunle Afolayan might be the guy. That didn’t quite happen, although he retains his status as its most well-known director. Over time, he became less messiah than mascot—and a succession of films after his last truly good film, 2014’s October 1, seemed created to roughen up the reputation he built at the start of his career.
So, if you are one of those who praised his early films, one question will always hang over his newer films: Is Afolayan back to his early, artistically ambitious heyday? With Swallow, which was made in a partnership with Netflix that will yield two more pictures, the answer is a frustrating one: the new film is somewhere in the middle. It is not as hopeless as 2017’s Tribunal; it is not as good as the flawed but fascinating The Figurine from 2009. Several times in the new film, Afolayan seems more interested in showing us proof that he has indeed set the film in the 1980s than on the plot, which has two women Tolani (Eniola Akinbo) and Rose (Ijeoma Grace Agu) at its center.
It is Tolani we meet when the film opens. She’s on her way to her mother’s house in a village where she is asked why she looks troubled. Her response is an extended flashback that takes up the chunk of the film, taking us to Tolani’s time in Lagos with her friend, housemate, and co-worker Rose. It is the un-woke ’80s and citified men are at the peak of their patriarchal power. A handsy boss gets Rose fired after she is rumoured to have slapped him. But it falls to Tolani to replace her. As you can imagine, the man hasn’t been domesticated. Out of work, Rose declares she has an aversion to poverty and decides to become a drug mule. Her new line of work involves the titular verb and is at the behest of a man called OC (Kelvin Ikeduba)—a tacit statement about female powerlessness in 1980s’ Nigeria. What follows is a dramatized commentary on capitalism, sexism, and prosperity Christianity.
Because all of those themes are still relevant in contemporary Nigeria, the story, which is adapted from the Sefi Atta novel, has the right politics and a convincing turn by Agu, whose Rose is the film’s beating heart. There just isn’t any real indication that something beyond a dour adventure for Tolani and Rose is at stake. Atta co-writes the screenplay alongside Afolayan and it’s tempting to attribute the film’s longueurs to literariness, given that Atta’s book isn’t exactly one of those novels built around the verve of a narrator’s voice.
But the novel thrived on Tolani’s interiority, while the film uses a voiceover insufficiently and so loses the book’s psychological insights. It then travels all the way to the other end of the faithful adaptation spectrum and, as in the book, deploys flashbacks to Tolani’s childhood. In the book, this was never too successful but, at the minimum, it gave some solidity to the central character. In the film, its deployment—in scenes purged of color—is too cinematically naïve for heavyweight Afolayan, serving only to increase the film’s duration.
It matters that for much of Afolayan’s early career, his films had derived their power and popularity by excising features of the average Nollywood film: low production values, high melodrama, middling cinematography. He was crowned for his ambition by a national audience unused to such royal treatment by its filmmakers. But something has changed in the intervening years.
Even as he has now worked twice with South African cinematographer Jonathan Kovel, Afolayan has made Swallow just good to look at—both a long way from his own early work and a far cry, too, from Kovel’s delightful camerawork with his maverick director compatriot, Jahmil X.T Qubeka, in Of Good Report (2013) and Sew the Winter to My Skin (2018).
There is, of course, a place in cinema for such a work as Afolayan has made this time. But the combination of dry dialogue, regular cinematography, extended screentime, and a plot with stakes so low, the characters barely register a death, Swallow—perhaps alongside its director—needs a jolt it never gets.
Director: Kunle Afolayan
Screenwriter: Sefi Atta and Kunle Afolayan
Cast: Eniola Akinbo, Ijeoma Grace Agu, Kelvin Ikeduba, Deyemi Okanlanwo
Producer: Kunle Afolayan
Associate producer: Seun Soyinka
Executive producers: Kunle Afolayan
Cinematography: Jonathan Kovel
Production design: Kunle Afolayan and Victor Akpan
Costume design: Toyin Bifarin Ogundeji
Editing: Esther Modupe Olatemiju
Music: ‘Kent Edunjobi’ Kehinde Hassan, ‘Niyola’ Eniola Akinbo
Sound composer/scorer: Anu Afolayan
Sound recordist: Paul Adu
Production companies: KAP Motion Pictures, Golden Effects Pictures (Nigeria)
Distributor: Netflix
128 minutes