Aba Blues Review: Jack’enneth Opukeme Has Found His Aesthetic. He Now Needs to Find His Story.

There is a line of dialogue in Aba Blues — a small, throwaway line — where a character mentions the price of something, and the number is 150 naira, and in the way that single number lands, you understand in an instant where and when you are. That kind of precision, the kind that earns its period setting through detail rather than declaration, is what Jack’enneth Opukeme does better than almost any director currently working at this level in Nollywood. He has an eye that is genuinely cinematic and an instinct for texture that the industry should be grateful for.

The frustration of Aba Blues is that this eye is in service of a story that never fully decides what it wants to say.

Amara (Angel Anosike) is a married woman in a city that is, by the film’s own admission, a character in the story. Her marriage to Uzor (Jidekene Achufusi) is stable in the way of things built carefully by people who have decided that careful is enough. Then Dirim (Prince Nelson Enwerem), her first love, returns to Aba, and the film enters the territory it has been constructed to inhabit: the gap between the life you chose and the life you did not, and what it costs to look at that gap honestly.

Anosike carries this weight with intelligence and with the specific body language of a woman who has learned to manage the distance between what she feels and what she allows to be seen. It is a difficult assignment, because Amara is written to be simultaneously the film’s most active emotional presence and its most guarded one, and Anosike navigates the contradiction with more success than the script always gives her credit for.

But Aba — the city — is the film’s most significant absence. Opukeme has said, correctly, that Aba has a rhythm that shaped every decision in the production. That rhythm is more audible in his descriptions of it than in what appears on screen. We hear characters speak of the city, but we rarely feel it in the way a place becomes real in cinema — through the specific friction of streets and markets and the sounds of commerce and congregation that a city makes when it is actually doing the work of being itself. The film is set in Aba. Much of it could have been set anywhere.

This is not a small problem. The premise of the film — that Aba’s specific character, its particular combination of ambition and memory and communal density, shapes what Amara’s dilemma means — requires the city to be present as more than a name. When the city is absent, the triangle becomes a story that has been told in many places and in many registers, and the period setting becomes aesthetic rather than necessity.

READ ALSO: The Return of Arinzo Review

What Aba Blues is, finally, is a beautiful incomplete thing. The visual vocabulary Opukeme has developed across Adire, Farmer’s Bride, and now this film is one of the most distinctive in current Nollywood, and it is absolutely worth watching for the craft alone. The performances, Anosike’s particularly, are better than the material fully deserves. The story, however, is the one place where the director’s considerable intelligence has not yet fully arrived.

He will get there. The evidence of what he can do with the rest of a film is too substantial to doubt it. But the next one needs a script that matches the director, not a director who is slightly ahead of his script.

Aba Blues is currently in cinemas nationwide. Dir. Jack’enneth Opukeme · Prod. Barbara Babarinsa · FilmOne Studios / Inkblot Productions · Opened March 20, 2026