Eyimofe (This Is My Desire) (2020)

There's a moment in Eyimofe (This Is My Desire) where nothing much happens. Someone waits. A generator hums. The camera holds. And somehow, in that stillness, you feel the full weight of a life stuck in place. That's the kind of film this is: quiet, unhurried, and genuinely interested in the texture of ordinary struggle in Lagos. It doesn't always pull it off, but when it does, it's striking.

The film runs two parallel stories, a hairdresser and an electrician, both dreaming of escaping Nigeria for a better life somewhere in Europe. Neither story intersects in any obvious way. What connects them is the shared experience of grinding economic hardship, personal loss, and the particular exhaustion of hoping for something that keeps sliding just out of reach. Directors Arie and Chuko Esiri aren't interested in plot mechanics so much as atmosphere and mood. They want you to feel what Lagos feels like: the peeling walls, the unreliable power, the density and noise of street life pressing in from every direction.

The cinematography is the film's most consistent strength. Natural light, long takes, and a muted colour palette give the whole thing a documentary-like realism that separates it immediately from the bright, frenetic visual language of mainstream Nollywood. This is clearly a film made with genuine artistic ambition. The performances are understated and sincere too, particularly in the quieter moments of despair, where less is being said but more is being communicated. There's real craft here.

And yet it doesn't entirely escape its own limitations. The pacing is slow, which I'm generally fine with. Patient cinema done right, something like Yi Yi, earns every long pause it takes. Here, though, certain scenes linger well past their emotional payoff, and you start to feel the film padding itself rather than breathing. There's a difference between contemplative and simply static, and Eyimofe occasionally stumbles into the latter.

What I found stranger was how the film, having worked so hard to establish a grounded, almost severe realism, periodically slips back into the kind of melodrama it seems to be deliberately moving away from. The tonal inconsistency is noticeable. You'll be fully absorbed in a quietly observed scene, and then something will happen that feels like it wandered in from a different film entirely. The final act is the worst offender: coincidences stack up, and moral lessons are delivered with a neatness that undercuts everything the earlier sections built so carefully.

So it's a mixed bag, but an interesting and worthwhile one. What Eyimofe gets right, it gets genuinely right. It treats its characters' desires with dignity rather than sentimentality. It doesn't dress up poverty for an international audience or turn hardship into something picturesque. The dream of emigrating isn't romanticised or condemned; it's just shown as the practical, desperate calculation it is for so many people. That honesty matters.

As a piece of Nigerian filmmaking it feels significant, a clear signal that there are directors working in that space who want to push beyond genre conventions and make something with a different kind of weight. Whether Eyimofe fully achieves what it's reaching for is another question. I'd say it gets about two thirds of the way there, which is still further than most films bother to try.

Three stars.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 2020  | Watched: 2025-08-01

View on Letterboxd →

Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Amazon Prime Video · Amazon Prime Video with Ads
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Stream: HBO Max Amazon Channel · HBO Max
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US

Affiliate disclosure: Movies With Macca may earn a small commission on purchases or subscriptions started via these links. It costs you nothing extra.

Related on Movies With Macca

More from the 2020s: Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025) · The Long Walk (2025) · Americana (2023)
More drama: Viy (1967) · Wonder (2017) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Beautiful Boy (2018)