Avante Review: Toka McBaror Builds the Tension Well. The Third Act Is Where He Loses the Thread.

Toka McBaror has a specific gift: he understands how to hold a scene in tension without resolving it too early. The early sequences of Avante demonstrate this clearly. A conversation that is, on its surface, entirely civil carries the weight of everything that is not being said, and McBaror lets it accumulate without releasing the pressure into action sequences or explanatory dialogue. The audience is made to sit with what they do not yet understand and told, implicitly, that the understanding will arrive on the film’s terms and not before.

Chimezie Imo, who has been quietly building one of the more interesting bodies of work in current Nollywood, arrives at Avante as a performer who is increasingly comfortable occupying the specific stillness that serious thriller roles require. His character moves through the early acts of the film with the deliberateness of someone who has already processed what is coming and has decided to go toward it rather than away. It is a choice that pays off in the scenes where the film is asking the most of him.

The premise — vengeance, love, and destiny intersecting in ways that mean moving forward feels like going backwards — is abstract enough that the film has to work hard to give it specific dramatic weight. For most of its running time it succeeds. The relationship that sits at the story’s centre is built with patience rather than efficiency, which is the correct choice for a film that is asking the audience to understand why the protagonist is making decisions that look, from the outside, like self-destruction.

The third act is where Avante loses the thread it has been carefully maintaining. The film accelerates into resolution in a way that does not respect the pace it has been building, and several of the questions it has raised — about what vengeance actually costs the person pursuing it, about whether love is a reason or a rationalisation — are closed rather than answered. There is a meaningful difference between those two outcomes, and Avante chooses closure when it should have chosen honesty.

READ ALSO: The Return of Arinzo Review

What remains after the disappointment of the ending is still a film with more craft in its first ninety minutes than most April releases manage across their full running time. McBaror is building toward something. Avante is evidence of the direction he is travelling.

Avante — in cinemas now. Dir. Toka McBaror · Afrisquare Entertainment · Starring Chimezie Imo, Kingsley Okafor, Patience Ujah.