Alahun – The Weaver Review: All the Right Parts, Not the Right Rhythm

Dare Olaitan directing a Yoruba epic is the kind of creative alignment that should produce something memorable. His eye for atmosphere, his comfort with the psychologically unsettling, his documented ability to build dread from the ordinary, these are exactly the qualities that the genre, at its best, demands. The opening sequence of Alahun: The Weaver confirms this immediately.

Produced by Singularity Media and Film Tribe, with cinematography by Emmanuel Igbekele and distributed by Genesis, Alahun: The Weaver follows Adeboriiku, the son of a Balogun, whose name carries the whole of his story within it. Ade, crown; Bori, to conquer; Iku, death. He was born into illness, frequently close to the edge of life, and advised by a herbalist to be kept from the strains of battle. In a community where the Balogun’s son is expected to inherit the warrior’s mantle, Adeboriiku grows into something else entirely: a weaver of baskets, a plaiter of hair. That rejection by his society, and the question of what destiny actually asks of a person whose gifts do not match their inheritance, is the film’s most interesting subject.

A Name That Carries a Story Before the Film Begins

In Yoruba naming convention, a name is not a label but a declaration. It carries the circumstances of the named person’s arrival, the hopes or prayers of those who gave it, sometimes the conditions they were born to overcome. Adeboriiku’s name is a complete biography in three syllables, the crown that conquered death. That the film understands this, and uses it to establish the character before any scene has asked us to know him, is an early indication of the thoughtfulness behind the project.

What the character then navigates is the specific cruelty of being misread by your own community. He is not weak. He is not without depth or ambition. He simply expresses his gifts through means that his world has gendered into shame. The hairdressing and weaving that his father regards as failure are, in the film’s larger architecture, the very capabilities that will matter. There is something genuinely interesting in the idea that the hero of this story is someone whose community has spent his entire life dismissing him, and that the journey ahead will require exactly the qualities they have scorned.

The hero’s journey the film lays out is structurally classic: an ordinary world disrupted, a call to something larger, a threshold crossed into the preternatural, trials and tests, and the possibility of transformation. The screenplay places two characters in parallel pursuit of the same goal, one driven by genuine love, one by the acquisition of status, and the contrast between their motivations is the film’s most coherent thematic device.

The romance that initiates the entire quest, however, is built on a relationship where the feeling is largely one-sided and the object of that feeling is drawn as a flawed and somewhat self-interested figure. This is not necessarily a problem, but the film asks its audience to invest in a love strong enough to drive a man into the spirit world without first building the audience’s belief in that love.

The servant Omokeinde, close to Adeboriiku and kept deliberately at a distance by the social order, suggests an emotional reality that the film circles rather than settles into. The dynamic between them says more about who Adeboriiku is than most of the scenes built around the romance he is journeying to restore.

A Hero Who Arrives Late to His Own Story

At one hundred and twenty minutes, Alahun asks for commitment, which is a reasonable ask for an epic. What it owes in return is forward momentum from a point early enough in the runtime to justify that commitment. The film’s first act is generous to the point of indulgence, laying out the world, the social dynamics, and the backstory of the father-son conflict in considerable detail before the story’s central event occurs. By the time Adeboriiku finally crosses the threshold into the spirit world, a significant portion of the runtime has already been spent in Irepewole’s ordinary concerns.

The film acknowledges, in its own dialogue, that time is urgent. Characters say it. The pacing does not reflect it. This disconnect between what the story tells us is happening and what the rhythm of the scenes communicates is the screenplay’s central failure. An epic can sustain a long first act if that act generates tension and revelation in proportion to its length. Alahun generates character and context in its first act but not enough tension to justify the duration.

The character motivations occasionally compound this problem. Decisions that should feel urgent are made slowly. Information that should drive action is withheld past the point where it would have changed outcomes. These are not narrative subtleties but structural hesitations, the screenplay taking the least efficient route between points that the story needs to connect.

Once the quest itself begins, the film improves. The world of the Égúngún is visually ambitious, and there are sequences in the spirit realm that deliver on the opening’s promise. The pacing does not fully recover, and certain conflicts are resolved with a speed that contrasts unfavourably with the deliberateness of everything that came before. But the journey has enough visual distinction and enough specific cultural texture to earn its second half.

A Cast That Rises and One Notable Absence

Moshood Fattah as Adeboriiku navigates the dual demands of the role, the social embarrassment of his ordinary world and the growing weight of the quest, with controlled understatement. He is particularly effective in the quieter confrontations with his father, communicating the specific injury of being misread by a parent with something between resignation and persistence.

The father-son dynamic is the film’s most emotionally credible relationship, and Olarotimi Fakunle as the Balogun matches Fattah’s restraint with the particular brittleness of a man whose pride has never been examined. Their scenes together are the screenplay at its most human.

Imotunde Adeyemo as Odépàdéórò is a standout. His presence sharpens every scene he occupies, and his character’s function as a parallel to Adeboriiku, the hero’s dark mirror pursuing the same goal with entirely different motives, is handled with sufficient distinction that the contrast lands. Lateef Adedimeji as the Demon King commits to a register of theatrical menace that suits the character, and while it occasionally tilts into pantomime, the film seems aware of this and uses it deliberately.

What the Eye Sees and What the Hair Says

Alahun is, production-wide, one of the more visually considered Yoruba epics in recent memory. The cinematography manages scale without losing intimacy, and the decision to shoot in the Yoruba language rather than reach for an English translation of its cultural specificity gives the film an identity that feels earned. The VFX, which reportedly involved over four hundred effects shots, functions as atmosphere rather than spectacle, which is the correct priority for this kind of material.

The hairstyle design deserves specific attention. In a film whose hero is defined partly by his skill with hair, the visual attention given to this element is meaningful beyond the decorative. Certain groups of characters share hairstyles that communicate their spiritual unity or collective identity without dialogue having to make it explicit.

The three witches, whose hair is physically interconnected in a zigzag formation, communicate through that shared design something essential about their nature that costume alone could not achieve. The Yoruba women of the spirit realm carry hairstyles that are specifically and unmistakably of their cultural origin. These are not styling choices but interpretive ones, hair as symbolic language, and they reflect the care and intelligence behind the film’s production design.

The title card’s placement deserves note. It does not arrive at the film’s opening, where titles conventionally establish. It arrives after the prologue has set the atmospheric tone and after Adeboriiku’s character has been established with sufficient specificity, the title falling into place like the naming of someone you have been watching long enough to recognise. That timing transforms the title from a label into a statement of identity, which is exactly what the Yoruba naming tradition holds a name to be.

Final Thoughts

The Yoruba epic as a genre has been producing films long enough to have its own fatigue patterns, its own set of expectations that each new entry either confirms or disturbs. Alahun: The Weaver is neither the genre’s most thrilling entry nor a hollow exercise in its conventions. It is a film that has something genuinely to say about identity, masculinity, and the gap between the gifts a person is born with and the ones their community is prepared to receive. It says these things clearly and consistently. What it does not always do is dramatise them with sufficient urgency.

The tension between content and execution is the film’s defining characteristic. The ideas justify the story. The story does not always justify the runtime. Olaitan has made a film that is culturally intelligent, visually capable, and thematically coherent, and has made it drag where it should move.

Verdict

Alahun earns its place in the Yoruba epic conversation. It is too carefully made, and its central argument too considered, to be dismissed as genre exercise. But it asks the audience to wait considerably longer than they should before the story becomes the story it promises to be. Audiences with patience for deliberate world-building and genuine interest in the cultural registers the film inhabits will find much to appreciate. Those who come for the adventure will find it too, but later than expected.

Rating: 3.5/5