Sundance Film Festival 2026: Olive Nwosu’s Feature Debut “Lady” Is A Spirited But Uneven Portrait Of Gender And Agency In Contemporary Lagos

Review: Olive Nwosu's Sundance 2026 debut Lady explores sisterhood and sex work in Lagos with spirited ambition but uneven execution. Jerry Chiemeke reports

Nigerian-born filmmaker Olive Nwosu's feature debut Lady (2026) announces itself with ambition as it wafts on an intriguing backdrop: an inverted view of the Lagos lagoon, two childhood friends perched on a dilapidated shack, and the shadow of trauma that will reverberate through the film's 92-minute runtime. 

Known for her shorts, the BIFA-nominated Masquerade (2021) and Troublemaker (2019), Nwosu attempts a nuanced exploration of sisterhood, survival, and sex work in Nigeria's commercial capital. The result is a film that dazzles intermittently but whose execution reveals the growing pains of a filmmaker still finding her footing in long-form storytelling.

The premise is straightforward enough: Lady (Jessica Gabriel's Ujah), a taxi driver eking out a living in Lagos, reconnects with her childhood friend Pinky (Amanda Oruh) after five years. Their trajectories have diverged sharply: Lady drives a half-decent Honda whose dashboard is adorned with an amulet-like bracelet, while Pinky has ascended to higher earning power as a sex worker. When Pinky proposes that Lady chauffeur her and her colleagues across town, Lady initially declines in spite of some prodding by Pinky’s pimp Fine Boy (Bucci Franklin), but financial necessity prevails, and what begins as a transactional arrangement gradually transforms into something more profound: an unlikely sisterhood forged in the crucible of Lagos's unforgiving streets. 

The story quickly takes a different turn after an incident which inadvertently forces her to immerse herself in the world of these women with whom she wanted to have little business with other than driving.

Ujah delivers a compelling performance, capturing Lady's internal fractures through lip-biting grimaces, tense facial cues, and awkward silences. Her fierce exterior conceals deep-seated brokenness, and Ujah navigates this duality with admirable restraint. When the camera lingers on her face during backseat trysts, we glimpse the childhood horror resurfacing, a trauma the film wisely leaves unspecified but palpably destructive.

As Lady chauffeurs these women, judgment slowly gives way to camaraderie, and she comes to appreciate their emphasis on agency, resistance, and freedom; their insistence on living life on their own terms.

The cinematography by Alana Mejia Gonzalez and Muhammad Atta Ahmed captures Lagos as both vibrant and voracious. Wide shots frame the city's intensity—gridlocked streets, dense neighborhoods, strobe-lit clubs, darkened beachsides—with a visual language that understands Lagos as a character unto itself. These moments succeed in conveying the city's chaotic energy, though one wonders if the frequent nudity serves the narrative.

Yet for all its visual accomplishment, "Lady" stumbles where it should soar: in its writing. The film suffers from temporal incoherence. The timeline oscillates between the mid-2010s and early 2020s without clarity.  The milieu suggests the former—characters express dissatisfaction with government and there are inclinations toward protests—yet the soundtrack tells a different story: Ckay's "Love Nwantiti," which was released in 2019 but became a viral sensation in 2021, sits uneasily alongside records composed by Obongjayar and Little Simz. Since 2015, Nigerian administrations have become far less tolerant of civil demonstrations, largely stifling trade unions. This muddled worldbuilding almost undermines the film's sociopolitical commentary. Is this Lagos real or aspirational? Nwosu never commits.

Nwosu does brilliant work juxtaposing Lady's idealism with the pragmatism of the women she chauffeurs. Lady harbours “modest” dreams: she simply wants to visit Freetown, where her mother came from. Her new-found sisters, on the other hand, entertain visions of frequent trips to the world’s revelry capitals. But the screenplay fails to fully develop these women as rounded characters. They remain muted in demeanour, a surprising misstep considering how animated and charismatic real-life Nigerian sex workers tend to be. Most are first-time actors, which partially explains the flatness, but anyone familiar with this community will find the portrayals disappointingly one-dimensional. 

Across the scenes, the pidgin dialogue feels transliterated rather than organic, lacking the fluidity and lexical richness of actual Nigerian street vernacular. Even Toyin Oshinaike, typically a brilliant speaker of the language, struggles with delivery. A script editor versed in Nigerian colloquialisms could have salvaged this; Nigerian pidgin is an entire language in itself, with prepositions, contexts, conjugations and structure. But as it stands, the stilted dialogue creates distance where intimacy is needed. 

Most frustratingly, the film squanders the opportunity to explore Lady and Pinky's friendship with any meaningful depth. For a film that positions itself as examining the intricacies of sisterhood, their dynamic deserves a weightier backstory, stronger motivations, and more substantial screen time. We're told they share childhood bonds, but we never truly feel the texture of that history. Their divergent life paths, punctuated by sixty long months of separation, should generate friction, resentment, nostalgia, something, anything. However, we have little to work with, which makes it difficult to hand in any real emotional investment or care for their joint (or even individual) trajectory. Blame that on a malnourished backstory, at least in relation to the two leads.

The casting of Seun Kuti as DJ Revolution bears inadvertent irony. His voiceover work as a revolutionary figure might align with his musical legacy, but accusations of violence over the years - the alleged assault of a police officer in 2023 and the pulling of a gun on unarmed citizens in 2020 - cast an uncomfortable shadow over his presence in a film about marginalised women reclaiming power. Art and artist remain entangled, whether Nwosu intends it or not.

In the canon of Nollywood films exploring sex work, from older features like Domitilla (1994) and Glamour Girls (1994) to more recent offerings like Oloture (2019) and Shanty Town (2023), Nwosu’s film distinguishes itself by attempting to centre these women rather than treating them as dismissive appendages.  Unlike these predecessors, which often moralised or sensationalised the topic, Nwosu toes the line of genuine empathy. This represents progress, even if only a modicum thereof.

Lady also joins a growing roster of feature productions presenting as love letters to Lagos. The sociopolitical terrain here isn't vastly dissimilar to Akinola Davies Jr.'s My Father's Shadow (2025), Tunde Apalowo's All the Colours of the World are Between Black and White (2023) or Arue and Chuko Esiri’s Eyimofe (2020), but there’s a marked difference. Where Davies Jr. manifests the city's essence with precision and emotional texture, Nwosu's Lagos struggles to create the intimate connection that transforms atmosphere into feeling. The world she has created is intense and vivant amid its carnivorousness, yet if you're native to the city, something essential remains missing: a sense of soul.

At its core, Lady contemplates liberation: personal and political, individual and collective. It embraces a carpe diem philosophy without descending into didacticism. Nigeria won't achieve freedom in 92 minutes, and these women won't escape poverty overnight, but the film argues for the dignity of the journey itself. This message resonates, even if the polity Nwosu paints feels a tad dated and shoehorned.

Nwosu's spirited debut shines in several moments, particularly in Ujah's performance and the cinematographers' rendering of Lagos's visual rhythms. The bones of an excellent film exist here, and you can tell that its director possesses vision and craft. But promise - and considerable promise, one may add - is marred by a bit of loose writing, which prevents the film from achieving the depth it reaches for. In the end, Lady is more interesting for what it attempts than what it accomplishes.

Lady is screening at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.