Revenge stories often follow familiar paths. Something terrible happens. A wounded protagonist sets out to restore balance through violence. Son of the Soil, directed by Chee Keong Cheung and written by and starring Razaq Adoti, travels this path through the streets of Lagos. The film follows Zion Ladejo, a former Nigerian soldier who returns from the United States after troubling events involving his sister Ronke draw him back into the city and into the orbit of a dangerous drug circulating through its criminal underworld.
What follows is a tense journey through confrontations, chases, and uneasy alliances as Zion moves deeper into Lagos’s volatile landscape. Along the way, the film hints at larger questions about belonging, identity, and disruption, even as its relentless action keeps those ideas slightly out of reach.
Son of the Soil
Directed by: Chee Keong Cheung
Written by: Razaq Adoti
Genre: Action, Thriller
Released on: March 1, 2026 (Netflix)
Language: English
A Man Who No Longer Knows His Own Home
Son of the Soil gestures toward a story about belonging. Zion returns to Lagos assuming a familiarity the city no longer grants him. The film, however, quietly undermines this assumption. His motivations are clear from the beginning. Rage and a sense of obligation to family drive him forward. A deeply personal incident becomes the emotional engine of the narrative, yet the story rarely pauses to explore the psychological cost of that experience.
Instead, Zion moves through Lagos with the determination of a man who has already accepted his fate. Redemption is not part of his vocabulary. The film never frames his journey as a path toward healing. From the moment he arrives, his trajectory feels sealed. Revenge is not a choice but a condition he must carry to its end.
The irony lies in how the city receives him.Through its title, the film seems to frame Zion as the “son of the soil”, though what unfolds on screen repeatedly exposes his distance from the land he once knew. His speech struggles with familiar Yoruba expressions. He calls his mother “Ma” rather than the more culturally rooted forms one might expect. Small details accumulate until the illusion of belonging collapses.
Meanwhile, the characters who move most confidently through Lagos are those who never left it. Remi, the street girl who moves independently and follows Zion through the city’s labyrinth, understands the streets with instinctive intelligence. Local kingpins such as Jagunlabi and Saka Bula command territories shaped by lived familiarity. Even the background figures who occupy markets and roadside spaces seem more embedded in the city’s rhythms than the protagonist himself.
Lagos itself becomes a central character. Shot on location, the city feels alive. Markets bustle, streets teem, onlookers watch from the edges. The camera captures a world where ordinary residents continue their lives beyond the frame. This spatial authenticity grounds the story in a recognisable reality. The distinction between actors and background figures sometimes blurs, giving the impression that the violence is unfolding within a real social environment rather than a carefully controlled film set.
One confrontation crystallises this tension. When Jagunlabi sides with Zion against Saka Bula, the latter questions the decision. Why support an outsider, an “Americanah”, instead of another local power? During the standoff, Jagunlabi invokes the phrase “sons of the soil”, hinting at a deeper conflict about who truly belongs to the land. The moment carries thematic weight. The film touches it briefly, then moves on.
Revenge in Motion
The plot of Son of the Soil unfolds with relentless forward momentum. After receiving a distress message from his sister, Zion returns to Lagos, where questions surrounding the circumstances of that call pull him into the city’s criminal underworld. Each step brings him closer to Dr Baptiste, a medical professional secretly distributing a dangerous drug known as Matrix across the city.
This structure follows the classic revenge blueprint. Leads appear. Fights erupt. Clues emerge through intimidation and violence. The narrative advances through encounters rather than investigation. Zion walks into hostile territory again and again, absorbing brutal beatings before pushing forward to the next confrontation.
The pacing rarely slows. Even moments that should carry emotional gravity rush past with surprising speed. Early in the film Zion wakes from a coma after being nearly beaten to death. His first question to his grieving mother concerns how long he has been unconscious. The answer matters less than his immediate desire to return to the hunt.
That sense of urgency defines the film’s rhythm. The plot moves efficiently from one set piece to another. Keke chases replace conventional car pursuits. Street fights erupt in markets and alleyways. Violence arrives quickly and frequently. In the middle of these sequences, the film occasionally reveals the limits of staging in a public city. During the keke chase in particular, real bystanders drift into the frame, people walking past, smiling, or watching the spectacle unfold.
Their presence can momentarily break the illusion. Armed men are running through the streets while curious onlookers stare in amusement rather than alarm, a reaction that slightly weakens the scene’s believability. At the same time, these intrusions echo the film’s larger visual approach. Lagos never feels fully controlled by the camera. The city keeps pressing into the frame, reminding the viewer that the action unfolds within a real and unpredictable environment.
Yet that relentless movement carries a cost. The story surrounding the action often feels thin. Dr Baptiste functions primarily as a target rather than a fully realised antagonist, a looming figure whose motivations remain frustratingly vague. Because the film invests so heavily in physical confrontation, the conflict between him and Zion rarely develops into something more ideological. The narrative hints at deeper stakes but never fully explores them, leaving the central rivalry without the emotional gravity the film occasionally gestures toward.
At times the narrative also relies on convenient hesitation from its villains. Characters who clearly possess the opportunity to eliminate Zion instead prolong the confrontation, allowing the story to continue moving forward. These moments reveal the mechanics of genre storytelling at work. The film protects its protagonist even when the logic of the situation suggests otherwise. One antagonist chooses intimidation over a decisive attack, while another abandons a clear advantage in favour of a prolonged fight. The effect occasionally feels less like strategy and more like narrative preservation.
Faces That Carry the Weight of the Streets
Razaaq Adoti approaches Zion with physical commitment. The role demands endurance more than nuance, and Adoti throws himself into the brutality of the action. His Zion staggers through the film battered and stubborn, absorbing punishment with a grim determination that mirrors the character’s emotional tunnel vision. The performance, however, reveals an interesting dissonance. Zion is written as someone familiar with Lagos, a man who once navigated its streets long before leaving for America. Adoti’s delivery often suggests otherwise. His speech patterns and mannerisms carry the distance of someone who has lived away from the environment for too long. Whether intentional or not, this disconnection reinforces the film’s underlying tension about identity.
The supporting cast supplies some of the Son of the Soil ‘s most grounded moments, though not without curious choices. Patience Ozokwor approaches Zion’s mother with her usual screen authority, carrying the weary composure of a woman watching her son drift toward inevitable consequences. Yet the performance occasionally raises questions about believability. Her use of Yoruba is surprisingly sparse, appearing only in brief moments where the language might otherwise feel natural. Most of the time she defaults to English, which creates a slight distance from the cultural setting the film is trying to establish.
Strangely, this oddity ends up echoing Zion’s own linguistic disconnection from Lagos. The result is a performance that feels both steady and slightly out of place, reflecting the same uneasy relationship with identity that shadows the film’s protagonist. Damilola Ogunsi gives Jagunlabi a controlled menace that hints at deeper layers beneath the surface of the city’s criminal hierarchy.
Taye Arimoro approaches Saka Bula from a different angle altogether. His villainy carries a strange charm. The character is clearly dangerous, yet Arimoro plays him with an irritating confidence that somehow becomes entertaining to watch. He leans into the character’s abrasiveness, allowing Saka Bula to be both menacing and deliberately aggravating. It is not the polished, calculating villain often found in crime thrillers. Instead, Arimoro embraces a kind of chaotic antagonism, the sort of character who seems to enjoy the performance of being the bad guy. The result is a villain who feels unpredictably alive. His presence becomes one of the film’s more memorable sparks of personality within an otherwise familiar revenge framework.
The film’s most memorable presence arrives through Ijelu Folajimi as Remi. Small in stature but sharp in instinct, she navigates the streets with a confidence Zion never quite achieves. Her performance carries the authenticity of someone who understands the city’s pulse.
Yet Remi’s role within the story feels oddly uncertain. The relationship between her and Zion sometimes appears unnecessary and narratively forced, as if the film is searching for an emotional thread to bind the protagonist to the streets he barely understands. Still, her presence hints at a deeper symbolic function. Remi appears at moments when death or danger has just passed through the environment, almost like a witness moving between fragments of the city’s violence. Through her, the film briefly reveals Lagos from the perspective of those who survive by instinct rather than force. While the script never fully develops this idea, Remi momentarily embodies the city’s resilience, a child navigating the same terrain that repeatedly overwhelms the film’s adult protagonist.
The Camera That Never Lets You Rest
If Son of the Soil finds its strongest identity anywhere, it is within its visual language. The film rarely allows the image to settle. Dutch angles tilt the frame, crash zooms push abruptly into faces, and handheld movement follows characters through crowded streets. The camera behaves less like a guide and more like a witness, observing events as they unfold rather than carefully staging them. This restless style produces a persistent unease that mirrors the chaos of the environment.
The style also recalls an earlier strain of action filmmaking. The exaggerated Dutch angles, abrupt zooms, and rough handheld framing evoke the visual grammar of late twentieth century action cinema, where urgency mattered more than visual elegance. Instead of the smooth choreography seen in contemporary blockbusters, the film leans toward a raw, almost documentary-like immediacy. Shots often feel improvised rather than polished, as if the camera is struggling to keep up with events unfolding in real time. This gives the action a tactile quality. The viewer is not simply watching a staged spectacle but experiencing the chaos of bodies colliding within a living environment.
The effect is that Lagos never feels neatly composed. The camera appears to stand somewhere within the streets rather than above them. Markets spill into the frame, alleyways feel tight and unpredictable, and movement constantly interrupts the image. The city pushes back against the camera’s control, creating the sense that what we are seeing exists within a living environment rather than a carefully contained film set.
Cinematographer Jack Thompson-Roylance reinforces this atmosphere through colour and texture. The palette leans toward earthy tones, rusted browns, faded reds, and the worn greys of concrete and metal. Even daylight scenes carry a roughness rather than polish. At night, warm streetlights wash the city in amber hues while deep shadows swallow the edges of the frame. The result is a Lagos that feels visually dense, a place where colour carries both energy and strain.
Street scenes occasionally reveal how difficult it is to fully control a real environment. Curious onlookers sometimes drift into the background, people who appear to be watching the production rather than participating in it. Their presence briefly cracks the illusion. Yet the film’s rapid editing and constant camera movement absorb these moments before they become distracting. Instead, they reinforce the sense that the story unfolds within a city that continues to exist beyond the film’s control.
Editing keeps the narrative in constant motion. Quick cuts give the action urgency, though they sometimes make the choreography harder to follow. The sound design supports the physical intensity of the fights, amplifying every strike, gunshot, and metallic clash.
The drawback of this approach is that the film rarely allows visual stillness. Scenes that might benefit from quiet observation are filmed with the same kinetic energy as the action sequences. Moments of grief and reflection pass quickly, leaving little space for the emotional weight of those moments to settle.
Still, when the style works, it gives Son of the Soil its most distinctive identity. The film may follow a familiar revenge blueprint, but visually it insists on experiencing that story from inside the restless pulse of Lagos itself.
Final Thoughts
He returns to Lagos assuming a familiarity that the city no longer grants him. The city responds differently. Lagos moves around him with its own logic, guided by people who understand its rhythms far better than he does. Remi survives by reading the streets. Jagunlabi and Saka Bula rule territories built on familiarity with the environment. Zion simply pushes forward, driven by grief that leaves little room for reflection.
The drug Matrix represents one form of foreign poison entering the city. Zion’s arrival introduces another. His violence destabilises the fragile order already present within the criminal world. By the time his revenge is complete, the deeper problems remain untouched. This leaves the film with an uneasy conclusion. The villain falls. The violence subsides. Yet the soil itself has not changed.
There is an irony buried in this tension. The man whose story anchors the film may not be its true “son of the soil” at all. From the opening moments, the cinematography positions the viewer at a distance. Angles feel tilted, frames catch fragments of movement, and the camera often watches rather than participates. We observe Lagos the way an outsider might, piecing together the city through scattered impressions. In that sense, Zion’s alienation mirrors our own. The film places us in the same position, watching events unfold without fully belonging to the environment we are seeing.
This perspective becomes even more interesting when one considers the film’s authorship. Chee Keong Cheung, a British-Chinese filmmaker, approaches Lagos from outside its cultural centre. His direction often carries the grammar of global action cinema, particularly Hollywood revenge thrillers. Certain moments reveal this clearly. One scene has Zion stumbling through the streets in a hospital gown, his exposed backside drawing amused reactions from passers-by. It plays like a familiar gag from Western action comedies, a trope rarely found in Nigerian storytelling traditions. The moment is funny, but it also reveals the film’s vantage point. We are watching Lagos filtered through an external cinematic lens.
Perhaps that is the Son of the Soil ‘s quiet irony. The camera observes the city just as Zion does, slightly displaced, slightly unfamiliar, trying to interpret a world that refuses to behave according to its expectations.
Verdict
Son of the Soil delivers a tense, visually energetic ride through the streets of Lagos. Viewers who enjoy relentless action and gritty urban settings will find plenty to engage with. Those searching for deeper thematic reflection may leave feeling that the film uncovers compelling ideas but never quite digs far enough into the soil beneath them.
Rating: 2.85/5
About The Author
