When Ewo begins, it carries the weight of something substantial; a film that might balance cultural gravity with modern tensions, myth with love, and music with meaning. Anchored in a narrative brimming with cultural and spiritual tension: life, death, duty, and the cost of belief, it seems ripe for something resonant.

Directed with a clear eye for Yoruba heritage and contemporary aesthetics, Ewo wants to bridge past and present, the spiritual and the rational. Unfortunately, what unfolds is a scattered, unsure tale that loses track of its centre. What it delivers instead is a collection of underwhelming performances, clunky dialogue, misfired suspense, and characters who feel more like chess pieces than living people.

Spoilers ahead.

Structure Lost in Meandering

Adunni (Bimbo Ademoye) and Kunle (Demola Adedoyin) appear caught in a romance whose foundation is secrecy. Kunle bears a hidden identity that of an Abobaku, a man destined to follow his king in death and the film intends for this revelation to act as narrative spine. However, this “secret” is neither concealed with finesse nor revealed with impact. From the earliest scenes, the tension is defused by the audience’s awareness. Kunle’s veiled references to the king, his absent sincerity, and Adunni’s baffling failure to notice all combine to dull what should have been psychological terrain.

The film drags through its middle section, bloated with meandering council-of-chiefs meetings, unnecessary comic relief, and repetitive emotional beats. Queen Eniafe (Moyo Lawal), the king’s Christian wife, is at the center of the cultural tension, opposing the traditional death rituals by praying, speaking in tongues, and smearing anointing oil on her husband’s forehead. But instead of a nuanced conflict between faith and tradition, we get a caricatured woman painted with broad strokes of ignorance.

Meanwhile, Adunni is portrayed as so oblivious that it stretches believability. Kunle’s cryptic remarks about the king’s health never seem to raise her suspicion, not once. Her passive reactions don’t feel like innocence, they feel like deliberate naivety scripted in to force the plot forward.

When the king dies, the queen steals his corpse to stop the rituals. The Abobaku trembles. Adunni is pregnant. Her mother, played by Jaiye Kuti in a typical overcast of Yoruba maternal suspicion, confronts her with the line “Hope it’s not what I’m thinking?” It is. And by then, most of us have stopped thinking anything at all.

A Hollow Tension Disguised as Plot

From the moment Kunle and Adunni meet, there’s a forecast of emotional investment, possibly heartbreak, maybe even spiritual conflict. But what follows is a plot that talks too much and says too little. Kunle, who is secretly the “abobaku” (the king’s horseman meant to be buried with the king), behaves in suspicious and cryptic ways, but Adunni never really responds. Her naivety is less a character trait and more a tool for the script to delay revelation. The pacing is erratic; moments stretch longer than they should, scenes stall around dialogue that never truly escalates, and a countdown to sunset is meant to create urgency, but the film fills that window with conversations that go nowhere.

There are moments meant to be weighty: Kunle’s inner conflict, Adunni’s unknowing pregnancy, the cultural crisis triggered by the queen’s religious beliefs. But they’re treated with the same tone and energy as the lighter scenes making everything feel flat.

Suspense is nonexistent because the film overcommunicates what it should conceal and underreacts to what should shock. There’s no twist, no shift, no dramatic escalation. Just a gradual slide into predictability.

A Love Story With No Heartbeat

There is no true emotional arc in Ewo. Characters don’t change, they just react or fail to. Adunni (Bimbo Ademoye) is introduced as the heart of the story, but her heart feels sealed off from both reality and consequence. Her relationship with Kunle (Demola Adedoyin) should be intimate, messy, and layered. Instead, it plays out like a series of arranged scenes with predetermined smiles and lines memorised without feeling.

The emotional thread of Ewo hinges on the romance between Adunni and Kunle, but it never truly pulses. Despite the actors’ efforts, their dynamic feels rehearsed, not lived. Bimbo Ademoye’s natural charm, expressive, animated, big-smiled, is present, but here it overshadows sincerity. There’s a performative edge to her delivery that keeps us from believing Adunni’s love, doubt, or fear. Demola Adedoyin’s Kunle mirrors the same issue: he smiles, he pauses, he looks into her eyes, but the emotion behind those moments is thin. Their scenes often feel like line readings, not emotional exchanges. The chemistry doesn’t land, and so the tragedy at the core of the story fails to register.

Moyo Lawal’s Queen Eniafe is perhaps the film’s most problematic creation. Intended as a devout Christian, her character is framed with such caricatured naivety that it borders on satire. Her pastor, her prayers, even her theological utterances, feel unresearched and hollow. What might have been a powerful commentary on postcolonial religious displacement instead becomes a crude spectacle of confused beliefs. The film attempts no sincerity here, it mocks rather than interrogates.

Jaiye Kuti as Adunni’s mother is typecast yet again as the intuitively suspicious mother, a trope that Yoruba cinema clings to without reinvention. She delivers what’s expected, nothing more.

Even beyond the leads, the performances across the board are marred by melodrama and stage-like delivery. From the queen’s exaggerated religiosity to the chiefs’ overly theatrical bickering, there’s a sense that everyone is acting for the camera instead of living within the frame. Dialogue sounds memorised, not felt. There’s no rhythm to the interactions, just alternating deliveries that feel disconnected from any emotional undercurrent.

Style Without Vision

Set in a contemporary Yoruba world, Ewo blends modern aesthetics with traditional storytelling. The music choices, though authentic in spirit, often feel mismatched with the mood of scenes. These choices straddle Yoruba folk and contemporary flair, language alternates between English and Yoruba, appropriate for a film navigating the old and new and so, the soundtrack follows suit. It’s not the kind of score that lingers, but it serves its purpose.

Scenes that should carry emotional weight are undercut by flat audio and forgettable scoring. Lighting choices are serviceable, though not particularly inspired. The editing falters most in pacing too many lingering scenes, delayed cuts, and unnecessary moments that extend already-thin conflicts. The costume design, at least, is coherent and appropriate to character function and setting

Final Thoughts

Ewo begins with a glimmer of potential. A tragic romance rooted in cultural conflict but dilutes that promise with flat execution, tonal confusion, and a story that refuses to evolve beyond the predictable. It undercuts its emotional stakes by mismanaging its performances, and it blunts its thematic weight with one-dimensional characters. There are moments here and there where you glimpse what it could have been: a haunting tale of love, loss, and the spiritual burdens we inherit. Instead, it ends up feeling like a missed opportunity padded with tropes.

Verdict

Ewo wants to be taken seriously, but it never earns that weight. Predictable, emotionally hollow, and often unintentionally comical, it ends up trudging through its own cultural terrain without ever truly digging in. A passable watch, but far from poignant.

Rating: 1.75/5