Relentless (review)

Andy Amadi Okoroafor, the director of the dark, brooding Relentless, told an audience at the Brown University Africana Film Festival that he wanted to make a film that would capture what Nigerians don’t normally see. In the first place, this means a film about Lagos shot mostly at night—a difficult and dangerous undertaking. (The light of the daytime scenes is gray, filtered through heavy clouds—no relief from the darkness.) It also means dealing with the posttraumatic stress caused by Nigeria’s involvement in the wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia, which Okoroafor called Nigeria’s Vietnam—and, underneath that trauma, the unhealed wounds of the Biafran War.

The protagonist, Obi (Gideon Okeke), was born to a father he never knew, a sergeant in the Federal Army during the Biafran War, and a mother whose family was wiped out by a bomb. He grew up in army camps and went to Sierra Leone with the U.N. peacekeeping force. He falls in love with a Sierra Leonean woman who has lost everyone she loved to the war. Her bloody death begins the film, and the story of their relationship is told in flashbacks throughout.

Obi has returned to Lagos and started a security firm (named Blessing Security after his dead lover) with an army buddy. They are hired by a notoriously corrupt political “godfather,” Chief Anaki, to protect his candidate during an election campaign. Anaki picks Obi because he had fought alongside Obi’s father in the Biafran War. Meanwhile Obi has met Honey (played by the star musician Nneka Egbuna), first when he rushes her to a hospital after a fall, and then when she is caught snooping around Anaki, whom she suspects is responsible for the disappearance of her friend Stella. Honey is a university student who has turned to prostitution, and she is pursuing both the missing person and the money she had deposited into a joint bank account with Stella. Honey and Obi both become convinced that Anaki has sacrificed Stella in the kind of ritual said to be practiced by Nigeria’s predatory elite. Obi and Honey have hardened exteriors suited to the streets of Lagos but are fragile within. Obi’s feelings for Honey—in which the desire to protect her, to provide security, looms large—are haunted by his failure to keep Blessing alive. Truth and security are both hard to come by in Lagos. Obi and Honey are in over their heads. Revelations and violence twist around each other as the film reaches a bleak closure.

Okoroafor left Nigeria at a young age, going to France to study cinema and then working in Paris in fashion, advertising, and music videos. As influences on his filmmaking he cites Wong Kar-wai, Korean films, Goddard, Imamura, and David Lynch. Relentless is a remarkably accomplished first feature, densely worked both visually and aurally. The camera is almost always hand-held and tends to circle tightly around its subjects (a technique necessitated by the problems of lighting night scenes on location), creating the film’s atmosphere of intimacy and guarded mystery. Jump cuts and double exposures are the other signature visual techniques. The soundtrack is packed with resonant music—Nneka Egbuna herself, the great Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen, Keziah Jones—and the sounds of Lagos surround and interpenetrate the dialog. Honey is often seen riding motorcycle taxis (“okadas”), and Okoroafor cites the snatches of conversation heard from the back of an okada as a model for his sampling of the Lagosian sound-scape. The whole film might be said to embody an okada aesthetics, mobile and perilous, staying alive only by synching perfectly with the flow of traffic. Okoroafor cut out much of the dialog in the first version of the film because he felt it explained too much; he wanted to make the audience members create their own interpretations. The film relies on texture and mood to convey much of its meaning.

The aestheticism of the film’s surfaces and...