Family Brouhaha directed by Femi Adebayo, attempts to explore the drama within a multigenerational Nigerian family tied to a wealthy cocoa empire. What begins as a story about legacy and disunity quickly spirals into chaotic excess. Let’s get into the review, spoilers ahead.

A Story Lost in the Noise

Family Brouhaha presents the Braimoh family as one in crisis after the death of its matriarch. We’re introduced to a lineage of characters fighting over inheritance, family loyalty, betrayal, marriage troubles, and a long list of personal grievances. There are multiple storylines, but none are meaningfully developed.

Instead, the film throws conflict after conflict without ever resolving them. Asake’s pain as a barren wife, Kunle’s cultural stereotypes, and Abiola’s traumatic monologue to a therapist are introduced with promise but left behind as the story stumbles forward. And those are just a few.

Themes of barrenness, infidelity, childhood trauma, grief, and generational pressure are all introduced but dropped before they can land. This is a story that never picks a direction. There is drama, there is shouting, there is betrayal—but there is no clarity.

A Plot Without Grip

From the first scene, the film sets the tone for confusion. A family tree appears with names and faces the viewer is expected to memorise instantly. What follows is a series of unstructured scenes featuring far too many characters, most of whom are underwritten or forgettable. Scenes begin and end without rhythm. Moments that should be dramatic turn comedic, and comedic bits fall flat or feel out of place. The story quickly devolves into unstructured chaos with too many characters and subplots.

A saxophone sound overshadows a birthday song during Grandma’s 80th, a Christmas hymn violin instrumental as a score (O Come, O Come, Emmanuel) plays while Grandma (Joke Sylva) is seen sad about the happenings and her husband’s death; and dramatic reveals like “a post about my husband kissing his so-called best friend is trending online?” are dropped in elementary style with no real weight. Asake shouting this line in front of someone she wants no business with (who also randomly follows her into her room) is one example of the film’s inability to anchor scenes in logic or tone.

Each subplot, from Asake’s marital problems to Abiola’s unexplored childhood trauma, begins with promise but is left hanging. The conflict between Mofe and his brother Abiola is introduced with weight, only to vanish. The tension between them, built on childhood wounds and resentment, is abandoned after a therapy session. The viewer is led through conflicts that vanish without closure.

Relationships are introduced but never developed, and emotional beats are constantly undercut by tonal confusion. The final act devolves into scattered cacophony and absurdity with no payoff. The film ends not with resolution, but with fatigue.

Performances Undermined by Poor Direction

The cast features familiar names—Gabriel Afolayan, Wale Ojo, Shaffy Bello, Joke Silva. Despite having an ensemble of recognisable talent, most of the actors are weighed down by poor writing and erratic direction. The dialogue is heavy on English monologues and expositional lines, often feeling stiff and unnatural.

The subtitles themselves are riddled with spelling errors and strange phrasing, distracting from the already chaotic flow. Characters code-switch between Yoruba characters often deliver lines in Yoruba, then repeat the same lines in English despite the presence of subtitles. This removes all fluidity from the interaction and makes conversations feel staged.

Mofe’s wife (played with exaggerated emotion) is a character whose drama never becomes comedy, despite clearly being positioned for that purpose. Gabriel Afolayan’s Kabiru doesn’t speak. Joke Silva, a seasoned actor, spends most of her screen time looking sad.

Direction, Tone and Technical Disconnect

The direction is fragmented. Actors feel like they’ve been left to perform on instinct without a shared vision. Scenes unfold with no tonal consistency. The film cannot decide whether it wants to be a drama, a comedy, or a farce. Reaction shots and jump cuts try to create rhythm but only deepen the confusion. Visual storytelling is absent. Characters shout, cry, and fight, but without emotional build-up, everything collapses into background noise. A Christmas hymn, is played in a scene meant to reflect sadness, but it feels emotionally confusing and contextually misplaced.

Family Brouhaha occasionally attempts to reflect mood, but this visual strategy is not tied to the actual scenes. Sound is another issue, especially in scenes with background music. Nothing flows. Instead of immersing the viewer, these choices push them further away.

Final Thoughts: A Mirror of a Larger Problem

Family Brouhaha does more than fail as a film. It represents a broader crisis in Nollywood storytelling. There’s an obsession with dysfunctional wealthy families who throw money at every problem and live lives out of reach for the average Nigerian. This film joins others like Asoebi Diaries and Owanbe Thieves in repeating the same themes of chaos, wealth, and empty glamour. The fixation on the elite and money is not just tired, it’s alienating.

These stories create a classist narrative loop, celebrating wealth without critique, using chaos as entertainment, and confusing aspiration for fantasy. Viewers are tired of dreaming through cinema. There’s a growing need for stories that reflect the reality on the ground, not just recycled fantasies of soft-life families fighting over money and maids.

It’s not the existence of wealth that’s the problem. It’s the lack of imagination in how stories about it are told. There’s a refusal to engage with working-class life, systemic struggle, or even realistic emotional conflicts. When conflict is just noise, and when direction is absent, the viewer is left with nothing but fatigue.

Final Thoughts: A Film That Forgets the Audience

Family Brouhaha doesn’t just struggle to tell a coherent story—it actively resists one. There’s no payoff to its conflicts, no emotional anchor to hold onto. Performances are uncoordinated, subplots are abandoned, and tone is sacrificed for the illusion of emotional intensity.

The film doesn’t know what to do with its characters, and worse, it doesn’t know how to let the audience in. For all its shouting and spectacle, it forgets the most basic rule of storytelling: give us something to care about. What could have been a layered family drama collapses under the weight of its own excess.

Rating: 1.5/5