In the vibrant, often audacious landscape of Nollywood cinema, 2025's Landline emerges not as a triumph, but as a perplexing cinematic misstep. Featuring the talents of Bucci Franklin, Kunle Afolayan, and Zainab Balogun, this film, regrettably, stakes an early claim for one of the year's most "unnecessary" and "senseless" narratives. While a three-actor ensemble can often be a testament to focused storytelling, in Landline's case, it serves only to amplify the glaring deficiencies within its core concept.
The most egregious flaw of Landline, however, lies not in its execution, but in its audacious and unoriginal premise. The film brazenly lifts its central concept directly from the 2020 American short film, Two Distant Strangers, starring Joey Bada$$, with nary a tweak or an attempt to disguise its inspiration. Much like Two Distant Strangers, which explores a Black man's experience of being repeatedly killed by a police officer in a time loop, Landline transplants this exact same time-loop mechanism into a new, albeit thinly veiled, scenario. It's a shocking lack of creative effort, offering no fresh perspective or meaningful adaptation to justify its existence.
The film's title, Landline, alludes to a seemingly central prop, yet its significance quickly unravels into a convoluted plot device. We are introduced to Kunle Afolayan's character, a soldier holed up in a safe house, awaiting orders. Meanwhile, his pregnant wife, portrayed by Zainab Balogun, is ostensibly at home, facing an imminent threat from Bucci Franklin's character—who, in a bizarre narrative twist, also embodies the very police officer dispatched to her aid. The crux of the film hinges on a mysterious caller who dials the unplugged landline in the soldier's room, repeatedly, after 11 PM, to warn him of an approaching assassin and provide instructions for his wife's survival.
What follows is an agonizingly repetitive time loop. Each failed attempt by the wife to evade her killer results in a reset, with the landline ringing again, offering new, desperate instructions. This cycle, an astonishing eight times over, dominates the entire runtime. It's a narrative mechanism that, rather than building suspense, fosters sheer frustration. One might argue the film would have been more aptly titled Time Loop, as the "landline" itself is little more than a flimsy excuse for the endless repetition.
Ultimately, the wife succeeds in dispatching her assailant. Her husband, confirming the kill, then utters a confounding promise of imminent return, swiftly followed by the declaration that he "has to save someone else first." The film then abruptly concludes, leaving the audience with an overwhelming sense of dissatisfaction. An hour of precious viewing time feels utterly squandered on a premise that overstays its welcome by several loops.
For the discerning Nigerian cinephile, and indeed for anyone seeking a modicum of narrative coherence and engaging storytelling, avoid Landline at all costs. The fact that this production graced cinema screens is, quite frankly, baffling. One can only imagine the heightened vexation had a ticket price been involved. Until our next cinematic dissection, we bid you farewell.
0 Comments