Kilanko Review: Allwell Ademola’s Final Film Is a Work of Quiet, Serious Intent

The Abiku figure — the spirit child of Yoruba cosmology who arrives in the world with the intention of leaving it, who must be marked and bound and negotiated with to stay — is one of the most emotionally loaded images in Nigerian storytelling. It carries centuries of meaning about child mortality, about the grief of mothers who have lost children they believe may return, about the intersection of medical reality and metaphysical explanation in lives that require both.

Allwell Ademola understood what he was picking up when he built Kilanko around this figure and placed sickle cell disease alongside it. He understood that the drama of the film was not the conflict between belief and medicine but the shared grief beneath both — the mother who would accept any framework that explained her child’s suffering and offered something to do about it. The film is, at its best, a film about what happens to love when it cannot save what it loves.

Rotimi Salami, who produced and stars, gives a performance of sustained restraint that the role requires and that the film’s quieter scenes reward. Tina Mba, as a character whose religious conviction is tested against medical necessity without the film pronouncing on the conflict, does her most controlled work in a supporting role that lesser films would have made either villain or saint. She is neither. She is a woman with a framework that is failing her in a specific way and a faith that insists the framework is not at fault.

Kilanko is not a perfect film. Its structural logic in the final third asks more of the audience’s patience than the first two acts have fully earned. Several scenes arrive at their point and then continue past it, holding a beat that has already made its impression. The film does not trust its own impact as completely as it should.

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But these are failures of confidence, not failures of intelligence. And Kilanko is an intelligent film — one that takes a subject that the Nigerian film industry has consistently simplified and makes it complicated in the right directions. It arrived posthumously. It deserves to find the audience that will sit with what it built.

Kilanko — Dir. Allwell Ademola · Prod. Rotimi Salami · Opened March 6, 2026. Allwell Ademola passed away in early 2026 before the film reached its widest audience.