Brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri burst onto the world cinema stage a handful of years ago with their beautiful Eyimofe, which I believe I first saw at the St. Louis International Film Festival that year. Now they have graduated to Clarissa, a trickier and perhaps less organized work which re-imagines Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway in their native Nigeria. By no means is it not a beautiful film like its predecessor, but I did often find it not adding up to the sum of its parts.
Regardless of what I personally feel about the film, however, I’m pleased as a big fan of Eyimofe that the Esiri brothers now seem to be getting bigger budgets and A-list talent in their films while still casting Eyimofe veterans and other Nigerian actors. On top of that, Clarissa seems to be exactly the film they wanted to make. It jumps back and forth between two periods of time in the life of its title character, played at middle age by the great Sophie Okonedo, and in her twenties by India Amarteifio. Other A-list talent includes David Oyelowo as Peter, Clarissa’s former lover, Toheeb Jimoh (who played fan favorite Sam Obisanya in Ted Lasso) as a young Peter, Nikki Amuka-Bird as Clarissa’s friend Sally, and Ayo Edebiri as a young Sally.
Ironically, the actor who steals the movie is Fortune Nwafor, a newcomer to the screen who plays Septimus, a Nigerian solider going through PTSD. Septimus is the wife of Aisha (Yasmin Dakaro), a tailor who does a lot of work for the upper-class Clarissa. The film has a clear eye for the divide between the haves and the have-nots, but unfortunately it’s its structure which lets it down in this thematic regard. Because Septimus and Aisha are only in the modern-day portions of the film, there’s much less of them in the film overall, and there are times at which the film could have really used more of them. They are a much better emotional hook than the arch debates between Clarissa and her equally wealthy friends, even though the acting across the board is first-rate. Because the main characters are so petty and often restrained, and because the storytelling tends to be rather piecemeal, very little sticks as much as it should, including the overall themes.
Despite my strongly held opinions on where the film falters, I suspect I’ll be in the minority opinion on this one, and I’m actually very happy for that to be the case. These are two filmmakers that I’m always going to be rooting for, and this film has plenty about it to admire. For one thing, Jonathan Bloom’s cinematography builds on that of Arseni Khachaturan in Eyimofe. Both films have this near-sepia haze about them, even when the colors are at their brightest. I especially appreciated a party sequence towards the end (it would seem all these characters ever do is throw parties) in which the out-of-focus glow of the lights in the background of several close-up shots provides an escape from what’s been roiling in their heads: disappointment, envy, fear, lust, questions of national identity, et cetera. Although these concepts aren’t as clear or engaging as I’d like them to be throughout, there’s no denying how wonderfully and unforgettably subtle the Esiri brothers can be at their best. Clarissa certainly contains a lot of their best. | George Napper
Clarissa was featured at the 2026 St. Louis International Film Festival. Further information about the festival, which runs Nov. 5-15, is available on the festival website.
