Drama · Faith · In cinemas now · Opened March 6, 2026
Verdict: Good Cinema
The Nigerian faith film has a reputation problem, and the reputation is not entirely unearned. Too many productions in this space have treated conviction as a substitute for craft — using the devotion of their intended audience as permission to skip the structural work that every story requires regardless of its subject matter. The result, over the years, has been a body of films that preach to people who are already convinced, that make the already-faithful feel seen while doing nothing to complicate or deepen what they see.
Onobiren is not that film. It is not completely free of the genre’s habits, but it carries itself with enough intelligence and enough honesty about its protagonist’s failings that it earns most of what it asks.
Roli comes from Warri and arrives in Lagos carrying the specific confidence of a woman who has survived hard water and harder people and believes that surviving them has made her ready for whatever the city has. Written by Laju Iren and directed by Famous Iraoya, the film is careful about what kind of woman Roli is. She is not passive in her faith, performing submission for the camera. She is active, often wrong, and genuinely surprised by the cost of the choices she makes on the way to the choices the story has always been building toward. Ruby Akubueze, in her most demanding lead role to date, holds the contradiction of Roli — the pride and the genuine belief, the stubbornness and the capacity for change — without ever letting one swallow the other.
The film’s most valuable creative decision is the ensemble around her. Bisola Aiyeola, as a woman whose life runs parallel to Roli’s and who represents a different set of answers to the same questions, brings warmth without softness. Patience Ozokwor, playing a character whose authority the film treats with the respect it has usually only extended to men in this genre, is given real dramatic weight rather than decorative elder status. The film’s theology, to the extent that it has one, is lived through these characters rather than stated above them.
The weaknesses are structural and they are most visible in the film’s midsection, where the pacing elongates scenes that have already made their point in service of an emotional build that would have been better served by compression. Deyemi Okanlawon’s antagonist is drawn in broad strokes that the rest of the film’s character work does not deserve as company. And the film’s conclusion, while honest, arrives with more tidiness than the story’s rougher first hour has prepared you for.
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But Onobiren topped Nigerian cinemas in its opening weekend, and looking at the film rather than the category, the performance makes sense. It is a film that takes its audience seriously. It assumes they can handle a heroine who is flawed, a narrative that does not resolve every question on the way to resolving the central one, and a Lagos that is neither enemy nor backdrop but the actual, complicated environment in which a woman has to figure out who she is.
That assumption alone separates it from most of what this genre has offered. It is enough to make Onobiren worth the seat.
Onobiren is currently in cinemas nationwide and in Ghana. Dir. Famous Iraoya · Written & Prod. Laju Iren · Dist. Independent · Opened March 6, 2026