Aba Blues Review: Jack’enneth Opukeme Set His Film in 1963 Aba and Trusted the Audience to Go There. Most of Them Did.

Film Review

Aba Blues is set in 1963. Not Enugu. Not Lagos. Not the cosmopolitan commercial surface of Nigerian cinema’s favourite geography. Aba — the commercial city in Abia State, at a moment three years after independence, before the civil war changed everything about how that part of Nigeria would understand itself for the next generation. Jack’enneth Opukeme made a specific choice to set his film there, in that time, in that city, and to trust that the audience would follow him. For a commercial Nigerian film produced by FilmOne Studios and Inkblot, that is not a safe choice. It is an interesting one.

The story: Adanna — played by Angel Anosike with a steadiness the role requires — is a married woman whose past arrives in the present when a former lover returns to Aba after years away. His return unsettles a marriage that had achieved the surface stability that time and obligation produce, not the deeper stability that genuine reconciliation between two people builds. What Adanna does with that unsettling, and what it costs her, is the film’s dramatic question.

The period setting is not decorative. Opukeme uses 1963 Aba with purpose: the specific social constraints on women of that era, the way respectability functioned as both protection and cage, the fact that a woman’s choices about her own emotional life were understood by everyone around her as property of the community. The film is genuinely interested in those constraints as dramatic material rather than as backdrop against which a universal love triangle plays out. That interest is what distinguishes it from a film that could have been set anywhere and merely costumed differently.

Angel Anosike carries the film with a performance of sustained internal weight. The character’s composure is not passivity — it is a choice, maintained under specific pressure, with specific cost. Anosike communicates that distinction clearly and consistently. Jide Kene Achufusi as the returning former lover has the harder task: to make the audience understand why Adanna would be destabilised by this specific man, not just by a man. He succeeds in the film’s better scenes and falls slightly short in the moments where the script asks him to represent an idea rather than embody a person.

The cinematography earns praise. The production design captures a period rendering of Aba with enough specificity to be convincing without becoming museum-like — the city feels inhabited rather than reconstructed.

Where Aba Blues falls short is in its pacing across the second act, which makes choices about what to withhold and when to release them that do not consistently serve the story’s tension. There are scenes that arrive at their emotional destination and then extend past the point where the extension adds meaning. The film’s best quality — its patience, its willingness to let a look carry weight that a line of dialogue would cheapen — occasionally becomes its liability when the patience extends slightly past the frame that was holding it.

Aba Blues is now in its fifth week. That run, for a period drama without franchise energy or a star at the level of Funke Akindele or Toyin Abraham, is a genuine commercial achievement. It found its audience. The audience that found it found something that is not being made often enough in Nigerian cinema: a film genuinely interested in a specific Nigerian place and time, interested enough to stay there rather than use it as backdrop for something generic.

Aba Blues — directed by Jack’enneth Opukeme · Produced by Barbara Babarinsa · FilmOne Studios / Inkblot · Opened March 20, 2026 · Currently in select cinemas.