By Akinwande Jordan
Paul Utomi’s Say Who Die opens with the volume turned high with Tolstoy’s maxim that all happy families are the same. Colours burst, music fills every silence, and the camera refuses to stay still. From the beginning, it announces that subtlety will not be the order of the day. This is a film built on atmosphere rather than narrative, interested less in what happens than in how the chaos of family life can be refracted through spectacle.
The basic premise of a celebration collapsing into tragedy serves as little more than a framework. The film does not linger on suspense or build a coherent puzzle. Instead, it insists on tone: joy, menace, and absurdity packed into the same space. At its best, the result is jarring, capturing the instability of a world where festivity can at any moment metamorphose into violence. At its very weakest, it feels like a performance of chaos rather than chaos itself, restless images replacing ideas that remain undeveloped and reeking of continued ideation.
The cinematography is central to this gaudy performance. Paul Utomi’s camera circles, hovers, and darts with a conviction that suggests urgency, even when a scene is static. Occasionally, the effect works beautifully, especially in sequences where suspicion and rivalry simmer across a crowded room. Yet the same techniques are repeated so often that they lose force. Movement without modulation becomes monotony, and what initially looks like energy begins to feel like agitation.
Colour and light are treated with similar intensity. Party scenes are drenched in brightness, every surface insisting on attention. Costumes shimmer, walls glow, objects appear almost lacquered. The saturation has its pleasures: it transforms the domestic setting into a stage where performance and spectacle can thrive. But it also erodes texture. Faces flatten into surfaces, and the world loses depth. When the film pivots toward grief, this visual strategy works against it, offering sheen where weight is needed.
Sound compounds the problem. Music and effects arrive not as complements to the image but as directives. Highlife melodies mark joy, sharp percussion signals threat, ironic cues undercut tension before it can build. The approach leaves little room for ambiguity. Instead of inviting the audience into uncertainty, the soundtrack supplies ready-made interpretations. Most revealing is the absence of silence. The film does not seem to trust its own images enough to let them stand unaccompanied. This is unfortunate because the cast often proves they can sustain a moment without amplification.
Performance is where Say Who Die achieves its sharpest clarity. Oiza Abu, as Odion, gives the film a charge of unpredictability. Her shifts between suspicion, rage, and despair are rendered with conviction, cutting through the stylistic noise. Evaezi Nimyel, as the mother, sharpens the atmosphere with understatement. Her glances, pauses, and vocal inflections hint at motives that the script only half articulates. These performances suggest the outlines of a darker and more disciplined black comedy than the one Paul Utomi has made.
Other members of the ensemble do not reach the same heights but still contribute to the texture of the film. Abounce Fawole plays the father with studied passivity, embodying a character who watches more than he acts. Secondary players lean into exaggeration, underscoring the farcical registers that Paul Utomi seems to prize. Collectively, the cast gives the film a coherence that the script does not, grounding its tonal instability in lived performance.
To its credit, Say Who Die rejects the flat realism that dominates much of Nollywood. Paul Utomi is not interested in polite storytelling or any storytelling at all, nor is he interested in conventional pacing. His vision is one of spectacle, provocation, and excess. That ambition matters because Nollywood thrives when it risks formal experimentation rather than replicating television aesthetics. Yet ambition requires control, and this is where the film falters. It confuses accumulation with complexity, mistaking noise for intensity.
The film gestures toward traditions of black comedy that stretch from Luis Buñuel to the Coen brothers, traditions where absurdity and menace illuminate the fragile rituals of everyday life. What is missing is rigour. Buñuel’s surrealism and the Coens’ deadpan ironies emerge from precision, from the careful shaping of tone and rhythm. Paul Utomi reaches for that territory but does not find the balance. Instead, the film piles on gestures of provocation that cancel one another out.
What lingers after the credits is not the story, which dissolves quickly, but the texture of excess: the blaring colors, the insistent soundtrack, the exaggerated gestures. There is an ambition here to remake the language of Nollywood comedy into something stranger and more unsettling. That ambition is admirable, but it leaves no room for applause. The execution leaves the impression of a film straining toward ideas it cannot quite hold. Its failures are instructive. They mark the chasm between wanting to provoke and learning how to shape provocation into cinematic value. If anything, it’s a lesson in how not to make a comedy of errors using its comedy of errors.
