Musical Drama · In cinemas now · Afrisquare Entertainment
Verdict: Worth Your Ticket
There is a scene in Evi where the title character, stripped of her record deal and reduced to performing in a lounge for a crowd that is barely listening, finishes a song, folds the microphone stand back into its cradle, and walks off stage into a corridor where she stands alone for a moment with her back to the wall. She does not cry. She does not perform dignity. She breathes, in the specific way of a person deciding whether to keep going, and then she walks back to the dressing room.
Osas Okonyon has not made a feature film before Evi. You would not know it from that scene. You would not know it from any scene in this film.
Uyoyou Adia’s musical drama is a genuinely rare thing in the Nigerian cinema catalogue — a film about the Afrobeats industry that does not romanticise it, does not reduce it to a cautionary tale, and does not use a music career as the decorative frame around a story that is actually about something else. The music in Evi is the story. Evi-Oghene Donalds is a singer whose talent has outrun her character in the specific way that talent sometimes does when it arrives before the person is ready for what it asks. Her label drops her. Her income disappears. Her image, which she has spent years curating into something that functions as a kind of armour, no longer functions.
What the film does with that premise is more honest than most Nigerian films would permit themselves to be. Evi does not become sympathetic immediately. She is difficult, guarded, and occasionally cruel to the people helping her, in the way of someone who has learned that needing people is a negotiating weakness. The film watches her learn, slowly and without redemptive shortcuts, that the version of herself she has built is not a self — it is a production. The person underneath it is the one who can actually sing.
Uzor Arukwe, as the conflicted manager who becomes the film’s moral compass without being allowed to be its hero, does some of his most controlled work here. Waje Iruobe, in a supporting role that arrives midway through the film and does not leave easily, brings the kind of lived authority to a scene that only someone who has actually stood in the spaces this film describes can credibly bring. The original soundtrack — the film’s most commercially significant asset and its most technically accomplished achievement — earns the film’s central argument: that the right song, performed with the right understanding of why it exists, is worth the whole cost of the person who had to become capable of singing it.
The film is not without problems. Several scenes in the second act rely on convenience rather than causality, and the romantic subplot involving Ibrahim Suleiman’s character is handled with less precision than the professional storyline that surrounds it. The film is better when it trusts its protagonist’s professional reckoning to carry the emotional weight, and occasionally loses faith in that trust at the moments when it most needs to hold.
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But Evi is something the industry has not quite had before: a Nigerian musical that treats the genre seriously, that uses song not as spectacle but as confession, and that asks its lead actress to carry it without the safety net of a recognisable franchise or an established fan base. Okonyon does not need the net. She has the whole film on her back and she carries it without appearing to try.
That is, in the end, what the film is about.
Evi is currently in cinemas nationwide. Dir. Uyoyou Adia · Prod. Judith Audu Productions · Dist. Afrisquare Entertainment · Opened March 27, 2026