There is a genuinely compelling film inside Alahun: The Weaver. It is about the violence of being told who you should become, and discovering meaning in the qualities society dismisses. Olaitan understands the richness of this premise, but the screenplay repeatedly slows down just as its ideas gather force.
By Joseph Jonathan
In Yoruba philosophical thought, the concept of ìwà, loosely translated as character, being, or the authentic nature of a person, is not something acquired through experience or constructed through social performance. It is something carried, something that precedes an individual’s arrival in the world and must be discovered rather than invented.
The related concept of orí, the personal spiritual intuition that governs an individual’s destiny, holds that each person is born with a particular nature and path. The deepest form of suffering, then, is not simply poverty, illness, or death, but being prevented from becoming what one was made to be. These are not abstract philosophical positions. They are part of the worldview that has shaped Yoruba storytelling, naming practices, religious life, and social organisation for centuries.
It is into this tradition that Dare Olaitan (Ile Owo, 2022) weaves Alahun: The Weaver, his Yoruba epic adventure that opened in Nigerian cinemas on August 21, 2026. The film follows Adeboriiku (Moshood Fattah), the son of Irepewole’s greatest warlord. His name seems to announce his biography before the story begins: Ade, crown; Bori, to conquer; Iku, death.
Yet Adeboriiku is born into illness and, on a herbalist’s advice, kept away from battle. Instead of becoming the warrior his father’s legacy demands, he becomes a basket weaver and hair plaiter. His gifts are treated as sources of shame because his community has already decided what a man should be. When Princess Olajumoke is taken into the spirit world by a Demon King, Adeboriiku must embark on a quest that requires precisely the qualities his world has spent his entire life dismissing.
Alahun: The Weaver’s central argument is simple but resonant: the gifts a community scorns may be the very gifts it eventually needs. The idea is rooted in Yoruba moral philosophy, but the screenplay does not always explore it with the depth it deserves.
The detail buried in the film’s production background makes this argument even more significant. Adeboriiku’s recurring illness is intended as an allegory for sickle cell disease, a condition with one of its highest global prevalence in Nigeria. The disease affects millions of Nigerian families and has long carried a particular stigma around bodies perceived as weak or inadequate.
Embedding that allegory within a Yoruba epic is one of Alahun: The Weaver’s most culturally specific creative decisions. It places a hero in a genre traditionally built around physical prowess while giving him a body his community considers deficient. His journey therefore becomes more than a conventional hero’s quest. It becomes the story of someone whose condition has been interpreted as a limitation, only for the narrative to reveal that it is not.
Unfortunately, the film does not pursue this allegory with the sustained commitment it deserves. It introduces a thread of genuine cultural intelligence, then handles it with surprising caution.
Olaitan’s strongest formal instincts appear in the prologue, one of the most atmospheric opening sequences in recent Yoruba cinema. Spirits arrive at night without roaring or threatening. They speak calmly, almost politely, as though they understand that genuine menace does not require raised voices. A woman is separated from her child through quiet supernatural coercion. The figures on horseback, shrouded in ghostly light, establish the film’s particular kind of dread: humanity confronting its frailty before forces it cannot comprehend. The ordinary world suddenly becomes permeable.
The problem is that Alahun: The Weaver does not consistently match the promise of its opening. The first act is generous to the point of indulgence. It spends considerable time establishing the world, social dynamics, and father-son conflict before the story’s central event takes place. Adeboriiku does not leave Irepewole until roughly an hour into a 130-minute film.
The Demon King, whose arrival should trigger the narrative’s central crisis, appears about 40 minutes in. These are not simply pacing issues. They are structural ones. When a hero’s journey delays its threshold crossing until almost the midpoint, the first act begins to feel less like narrative and more like an extended world-building exercise. Context has been given priority over momentum.
The screenplay compounds the problem through decisions that undermine its own dramatic logic. When Adeboriiku realises that the Demon King is supernatural, information that should immediately change the community’s response, he allows his father to send him home without revealing what he knows.
When the Balogun returns from a fruitless search and berates his son for withholding crucial information, the film treats this as dramatic irony. It feels more like an acknowledgement of a problem the screenplay created for itself.
The king’s response to Odepadeoro’s proposal creates a similar problem. Odepadeoro offers to retrieve the princess in exchange for her hand, yet the king takes an entire day to consider the proposal. This happens after the film has established that time is critical. A ruler whose daughter has been taken by a supernatural being should not need a full day to consider the only available solution. The screenplay knows the situation is urgent. It simply does not behave as though it is.
What redeems the second half of Alahun: The Weaver is the visual ambition with which the spirit world is constructed. Emmanuel Igbekele’s cinematography manages scale without sacrificing intimacy, while the realm of the Égúngún is rendered with enough cultural texture to justify the production’s investment in more than 400 effects shots.
The visual effects work best when they function as atmosphere rather than spectacle. The spirit world feels like a genuine elsewhere rather than a digitally enhanced version of the ordinary world. The decision to make the film entirely in Yoruba also gives its cultural identity greater weight.
The hairstyle design is Alahun: The Weaver’s most quietly intelligent formal achievement. In a story whose hero is partly defined by his skill with hair, this element becomes more than decoration. The three witches, whose hair is physically connected in a zigzag formation, communicate something about their collective nature through design that dialogue could not convey as efficiently.
Characters in the spirit realm carry hairstyles rooted specifically in Yoruba culture. Hair becomes a form of symbolic language, which is fitting given the importance of hair in Yoruba cultural expression. The film understands this and incorporates it into the visual grammar of its most culturally specific sequences.
Moshood Fattah handles the role’s competing demands with controlled understatement. Adeboriiku must carry the embarrassment of his ordinary life while gradually assuming the weight of his quest. Fattah’s restraint serves that tension better than a more demonstrative performance might have. His scenes with Olarotimi Fakunle as the Balogun are among the film’s most emotionally credible. Their relationship captures the brittleness of a father and son who love each other but have never learned how to communicate that love. The Balogun’s pride has gone largely unexamined, while Adeboriiku has spent years absorbing its consequences.
Imotunde Adeyemo as Odepadeoro is another standout. His presence sharpens the film, particularly because he functions as Adeboriiku’s dark mirror. Both men pursue the same goal but from radically different positions. Lateef Adedimeji’s Demon King, meanwhile, embraces a theatrical menace that occasionally approaches pantomime. In the film’s better moments, however, that excess feels intentional rather than misplaced.
The romance that drives the quest is less convincing. Olajumoke’s feelings for Adeboriiku are largely one-sided during much of the first act. That is not inherently a problem, but the film needs the audience to believe in a love powerful enough to send a man into the spirit world. The relationship is never made quite tangible enough to support that weight.
The servant Omokeinde, who remains close to Adeboriiku while being separated from him by social convention, suggests an emotional reality the film never fully explores. His relationship with Adeboriiku often feels more revealing than the romance at the centre of the quest. The film’s recurring musical motif reinforces the romantic storyline, but the screenplay has not done enough to make that relationship feel as emotionally urgent as the music suggests.
By the time Alahun reaches its climax, the accumulated inefficiencies of the first act have tested the audience’s patience. The resolution then arrives with a speed that contrasts sharply with the deliberateness of everything that precedes it. Conflicts that have been carefully constructed for more than an hour are resolved with surprising ease. The result is relief rather than satisfaction.
Still, it would be unfair to reduce Alahun to its structural problems. Olaitan has made a culturally intelligent and, at its best, formally considered film. Its central argument about ìwà and the violence of communities that impose inherited expectations on individuals is compelling.
The Yoruba epic is also a genre with its own familiar patterns, and Alahun finds ways to disturb them. The prologue, hairstyle design, and the allegorical potential of Adeboriiku’s illness all suggest a filmmaker whose instincts are sometimes more ambitious than the screenplay can accommodate. The film Olaitan’s opening sequence promises is a film worth waiting for. The film that follows is still worth watching. It simply asks for more patience than its own story knows how to justify. There is a genuinely compelling film inside Alahun: The Weaver. It is about the violence of being told who you should become, and discovering meaning in the qualities society dismisses. Olaitan understands the richness of this premise, but the screenplay repeatedly slows down just as its ideas gather force.
Rating: 2.6/5
Joseph Jonathan is a historian who seeks to understand how film shapes our cultural identity as a people. He believes that history is more about the future than the past. When he’s not writing about film, you can catch him listening to music or discussing politics. He tweets @Chukwu2big.