Landline is an emotionally-charged thriller that takes a bold swing at the time-loop genre, even if it doesn’t always connect.
By Joseph Jonathan
There is a particular pain in knowing exactly when and how you will lose the person you love most and being powerless to stop it. However, this pain becomes more unbearable when you’re forced to relive that loss on endless repeat. Dele Dohertyʼs debut feature, Landline weaponises this cruel knowledge into a relentless psychological vise, trapping its characters (and audience) in a temporal nightmare where devotion becomes its own form of torture.
Written by Doherty, Landline follows Kola (Gabriel Afolayan), a military sergeant stranded in a safehouse, who begins receiving calls from a mysterious voice on an old, disconnected landline. The caller warns him that his wife, Shalewa (Zainab Balogun), is about to be murdered and when the prediction comes true, Kola is thrust into a desperate race against time, reliving the same harrowing moment over and over, each time trying and failing to alter the outcome.
The landline, as the caller explains, is not a traditional time machine but a “passage” that allows communication across fractured moments in time. It’s a clever twist on the usual reset mechanics of time-loop narratives, but the film never fully explores the implications of this idea. Instead, it settles for tension over depth, leaving the audience with more questions about the time loop than emotional payoff.
This subverts traditional time-loop mechanics seen in films like the 1993 Groundhog Day (complete daily resets), 2014ʼs Edge of Tomorrow (death-triggered reboots), and 2017ʼs Happy Death Day (iterative problem-solving), by replacing physical time travel with fractured communication.
Here, the landline acts as a temporal “passage” allowing future warnings to bleed into the present, creating suspense through real-time crisis management rather than the genre’s usual trial-and-error growth. While this twist avoids repetition fatigue, its unexplored rules (unlike Source Codeʼs (2011) precise 8-minute loops or Palm Springsʼ (2020) emotional exit conditions) leave the audience craving deeper logic beneath the tension.
The best time-loop stories understand that repetition alone isn’t horrifying, it’s what we stand to lose with each reset that sends shivers down the spine. Where most films in the genre focus on the protagonist’s personal growth or puzzle-solving, Landline lingers on the visceral terror of hearing your loved one die, not just once, but in countless variations, each failure etching deeper cracks in Kola’s mind. This isn’t a film about escaping fate so much as it’s about how love curdles into obsession when stretched across infinite iterations of the same unbearable moment.
What Landline understands better than most is that true horror lies not in the looping mechanism itself, but in watching how the accumulated trauma of infinite resets corrodes even the strongest bonds. In Kola’s case, it turns his devotion into desperation, and love into its own kind of prison.
Another area where Landline succeeds is in its performances. Afolayan embodies Kola’s escalating desperation with a rawness that keeps the repetitive structure from feeling stale. His military training informs his strategies — he barks orders at Shalewa over the phone, instructing her on how to defend herself — but his anguish at hearing her die again and again is what lingers. Balogun, however, is the film’s true standout. Shalewa is not just a damsel in distress; she’s a fully realised character, her fear and determination palpable in every scene.
For all its strengths, Landline falters in its world-building. The killer, a masked intruder with no discernible motive or personality, is a hollow antagonist. Unlike the eerie, almost supernatural presence of Babyface in Happy Death Day or the psychological weight of Derek Frost (Source Code (2011)), this figure exists solely to perpetuate the loop, with no real menace or narrative purpose. The late reveal that Kola’s superiors orchestrated the attack adds a layer of political intrigue, but it’s underdeveloped, more of an afterthought than a meaningful twist.
The film’s biggest flaw, however, is its ending. Time-loop narratives live or die by their resolutions, and Landlineʼs is frustratingly opaque. The loop is broken, but how? Is it Kola’s refusal to give up? Shalewa’s defiance? The exposure of his bosses’ betrayal? The film doesn’t commit to an answer, leaving the audience to fill in the gaps.
Compare this to Groundhog Day, where Phil’s transformation is the key to his freedom, or Edge of Tomorrow, where Cage’s growth and sacrifice are inextricably linked to his escape. Landline lacks that clarity, opting for ambiguity where specificity would have been more satisfying.
Landline is a promising debut for Doherty, proving that Nollywood can deliver tense, high-concept thrillers without bloated budgets or unnecessary subplots. It is an emotionally-charged thriller that takes a bold swing at the time-loop genre, even if it doesn’t always connect. It offers another Nollywood entry into a typically Western-dominated trope, and while it may not stick the landing, the journey is compelling enough to warrant your attention.
Rating: 2.5/5
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 @JosieJp3.