Efunroye – The Unicorn: History’s Dangerous Woman, Written Soft

Directed by Tope Adebayo Salami, Adebayo Tijani, and Abbey Lanre, and executive produced by actress and filmmaker Faithia Williams alongside Niyi Akinmolayan, Diran Adeyinka, and Kemi Anibaba, this Yoruba-language historical epic tells the story of Madam Efunroye Tinubu, a 19th-century merchant, kingmaker, and slave trader whose influence on Lagos politics was substantial enough to unsettle both local royalty and British colonial authority.

Released in cinemas on the 1st of May, 2026, and distributed by FilmOne Entertainment, the film had already spent over a year outrunning accusations of historical whitewashing, born the moment Faithia Williams Balogun announced the project in October 2024 to a social media storm that questioned whether any filmmaker, regardless of intent, should frame a known slave trader as a unicorn. The title alone was a declaration. The film was always going to have to answer for it.

The Woman Versus the Writing

Efunroye Tinubu: The Unicorn opens in mythic territory. We meet its subject not in a market or a palace but in something closer to purgatory, a woman rising from a coffin and confronted with a fundamental choice between feminine and masculine power.

She chooses the masculine, and with that decision the film plants the seed of every conflict that follows, including her inability to conceive in her later years. It is a bold opening. It establishes Efunroye not merely as a merchant or a politician but as a woman who traded something essential of herself for survival. The difficulty is that the film never quite decides what to do with that choice.

The emotional architecture of this story rests on a recognisable foundation: a woman who gives everything to the structures around her and is discarded the moment she becomes inconvenient. Efunroye loses her first husband young, raises two sons alone, and builds herself into a force in Lagos commerce before marrying into royalty.

She helps kings ascend to thrones. She advises chiefs on trade. She constructs an empire, and when that empire begins to threaten the profits of the very men she empowered, they exile her without ceremony. That arc carries real weight, and in its best moments the film lets you feel the specific loneliness of a woman whose currency is competence and whose reward is expulsion.

But the emotional core is compromised by how the character is written. History describes Efunroye Tinubu as shrewd and calculating, a woman who used the connections of her husbands deliberately and strategically, not out of wifely devotion but out of a precise understanding of how power moved. That cunning is exactly what British Consul Benjamin Campbell feared and documented.

The film flattens it into loyalty. For much of its runtime, Efunroye reads as a good woman navigating a hard world, a faithful wife doing right by her family and household. It is only the drowning of the slaves that punctures this portrait, a moment where the film forces you to sit with the fact that this woman, whatever her complexity, treated human lives as merchandise she would sooner destroy than sell cheap. That scene earns its moral discomfort. It stands as the film’s most honest acknowledgement that Efunroye Tinubu was not a heroine in any tidy sense.

And yet a single scene cannot carry the moral weight of an entire film. The writing, for the most part, does not give us the Efunroye Tinubu that history recorded. It gives us a softened version, admirable in places, sympathetic in many, but too comfortable with its own subject to hold her fully accountable.

When the Kingdom Loses Its Momentum

The film structures itself as a sweeping life chronicle, moving from Efunroye’s early years near Abeokuta through her marriages, her rise in Lagos commerce and politics, her collision with British colonial authority, and finally her exile. As an architecture, it holds. As an execution, it buckles in the middle.

The opening act, for all its narrative ambiguities, moves with energy. The supernatural sequences, the early losses, the first stirrings of a commercial empire, these carry the film forward with enough momentum to sustain attention. The third act carries the weight of a woman watching everything she built turn against her. Exile, in any story, is a reckoning.

It is the political middle that tests patience. A film about a woman who shaped the political landscape of 19th-century Lagos ought to find those politics thrilling. Here they drag. The negotiations, the manoeuvring between kings, the colonial pressure and its aftermath, these accumulate without enough tension to make the story feel urgent. The narrative loses its grip, and with a film of this length, losing your grip even briefly costs more than the production can afford.

The supporting subplots do not recover the momentum. Kosoko is introduced as a formidable figure, a man whose hunger for power and capacity for cruelty are drawn in clear strokes, and then the film simply releases him. He flees a battle and never returns. For a character built with such menace, the exit is bafflingly quiet. Itala’s reign is dispatched by narration as though the film suddenly remembered it had too many threads. These are not minor omissions. They are the kind of unresolved business that leaves an audience with the uneasy feeling that the story was not fully mapped before cameras rolled.

The supernatural strand suffers most. What the film opens with, a woman of spiritual power and mystical agency, recedes almost entirely as the story moves forward. Efunroye uses incantations early to protect her children. She fights with something beyond ordinary strength. But by the time she is navigating Lagos politics and directing slave trades, those powers have vanished without explanation, without loss, without consequence beyond the vague implication of her original choice. A story that begins in myth and ends in commerce has to earn that journey. This one does not.

What the Lead Gives, and What the Relief Takes

Faithia Williams Balogun inhabits Efunroye with commitment. There is no question of her investment in the role. She moves through the film’s emotional register with a physicality that convinces, and in the scenes that demand presence, she delivers it. The difficulty, as with much in this film, lies not in what she brings but in what the writing asks of her. A character written primarily as devoted and reactive cannot reveal the full dimensions of a woman history records as strategically brilliant and morally complex. Faithia does well with what she is given.

The supporting cast reads like a roll call of Yoruba cinema’s most dependable names: Adebayo Salami, Odunlade Adekola, Ibrahim Chatta, Femi Adebayo, and others whose collective presence lends the production an institutional gravity. But few of them are given room to do more than anchor their scenes. The ensemble performs competently without distinction.

The most pointed performance issue arrives with the film’s comic relief: two interpreters who bridge the gap between Efunroye’s world and the foreign traders who enter it. The first carries a legible subtext, a man positioned between two parties neither of whom understands the other, making use of that gap for himself. The exaggerations land occasionally. But this is the strain of comedy Nollywood has leaned on for decades, and it sits uneasily in a film that otherwise reaches for something grander.

Isaac Ayomide Olayiwola, known publicly as Layi Wasabi, plays the second interpreter, and here the film walks into a problem it does not seem to notice. Olayiwola is a social media comedian with a strongly defined and widely recognisable persona.

\That persona does not disappear when he steps into a period film. His polished English, his rhythm, his manner, all of it reads as the character from his skits transplanted into 19th-century Lagos. Audiences who know his work cannot separate the performer from the performance, and the film asks them to do exactly that without giving them any reason to. A firmer directorial hand could have solved this.

What the Frame Holds and What It Lets Slip

The film’s most consistent achievement is its sound. The Yoruba soundtrack does what Yoruba musical tradition does naturally: it mirrors the emotional temperature of each scene and amplifies it without apology. In the sequence where Efunroye loses her children, eulogies and cries layer over the images with a rawness that bypasses argument and settles in the chest. The music earns its tears there, even in a scene the film’s prior emotional scaffolding had not fully prepared you for. That is the paradox of the soundtrack throughout. It does the heavy lifting that the writing sometimes fails to set up.

Cinematically, the film has its moments of confidence. The slave market sequence, shot under a high midday sun with framing that gives the space real depth, communicates its setting with precision. You understand immediately the scale and logic of what you are watching. That visual directness is assured filmmaking.

But that assurance is not consistent. A visible trace of powder on Faithia’s face in some scenes reads modern against the period setting. The film’s obligation in these moments is to make the audience forget where they are. Livability, not smoothness, is what period cinema demands of its lead. A wide shot through an arc-shaped gate reveals the structure shifting beneath the movement of the actors, reminding you that what you are watching was built and not found. These are small things, and period filmmaking lives and dies in its small things.

The editing has its own restlessness. There are stretches where cuts arrive quickly and the rhythm feels choppy, following dialogue clarity at the expense of visual flow. One creative shot begins to build toward something and is abandoned before it arrives.

Whether this reflects a directorial decision or a lapse in post-production, the effect is the same: a film that reaches for formal ambition and does not always follow through. The three directors produce a film that is mostly cohesive but carries just enough tonal variation to suggest that not every creative decision passed through the same sensibility.

One note beyond the cinema itself: the film’s official poster places Faithia Williams Balogun in what is visibly a modern lace wig beneath a gele. Whatever its commercial logic in selling familiar faces to a wide audience, it is a telling misstep for a production asking viewers to commit to a world three centuries removed.

Final Thoughts

Efunroye Tinubu: The Unicorn cannot fully exist outside of the moment that made it. This is not a flaw so much as a condition. When a story carries a name this freighted in contemporary Nigerian consciousness, when that name holds the specific voltage it holds in the country’s present tense, the decision to tell that story is never purely artistic. Filmmakers who work close to power know the weight of the stories they choose. Audiences who live under that power know it too. The space between what this film says and what it declines to say is, for many viewers, entirely legible.

The whitewashing critique that met this film before it was made has merit, though not uniformly. The slave-drowning scene is honest. The film does not pretend Efunroye was beyond reproach. But honest moments do not build an honest portrait.

The cumulative effect of the writing, its preference for Efunroye as a loyal and devoted figure over the strategically cunning operator history documented, tilts the film toward a flattering framing it never escapes. Depicting a powerful and morally compromised woman primarily as someone doing right by the people she loves is not neutrality. It is a choice, and a consequential one.

What the film does illuminate, almost incidentally, is how history disposes of women whose power becomes inconvenient. Efunroye advises kings, finances wars, and constructs trade systems that outlast her influence, and when her presence costs the men around her more than it benefits them, she is removed. That story has real force.

Verdict

This film is for history enthusiasts, Yoruba cultural audiences, and viewers willing to engage with a complexity the film gestures at without fully inhabiting. It is honest enough in its construction not to pretend otherwise. What it offers, a convincing period world, a committed lead performance, and a soundtrack that genuinely moves, is real.

What it withholds, the full moral weight of the woman at its centre, is the one thing it needed most. Go in with your history intact, and you will get considerably more out of it than the film gives on its own.

Rating: 2.25/5