Love and New Notes wants to be different. It wants to be bold. It wants to be socially and culturally relevant. If only it had clarity of vision, it might have accomplished some of these goals.
By Vivian Nneka Nwajiaku
Another Valentine box office hit, director Kayode Kasum (The Serpent’s Gift (2025); Fractured (2025)) and producer Timini Egbuson collaborate on Love and New Notes (2026), their follow-up to the 2025 record-breaker, Reel Love. Here, again, Egbuson stars in the lead role, but this time, he shares the stage with Sophie Alakija, a pairing that calls to mind their romance in Kevin Apaa’s Dinner at My Place (2022), where they had much stronger chemistry.
If one thinks back to the premise of Dinner at My Place being an incident with an engagement ring, it’s difficult not to react to the similar opening scene in Love and New Notes, whether with a chuckle or with a cringe. But not to worry, Love and New Notes is a completely different film with much higher ambitions, even if it does not meet them.
Egbuson and Alakija are Boma and Chisom, a young, planning-a-wedding, newly pregnant couple in 1980s Nigeria. Chisom is the regularly employed one, she counts money for a living. Boma, on the other hand, used to have some kind of job in the shipping sector, but with General Muhammadu Buhari, the then head of state, restricting imports, he has had to turn to a different kind of employment—as a swindler.
With the first round of Buharinomics hitting the country, they start to feel the pressures in their vinyl-decorated home. Chisom wants her fiancé to find a stable job and put the life of crime behind him. Boma swears that he needs just one big score to change their lives and raise their unborn child. But this is Nigeria, and even in 1984, problematic government policies will favour some people and their families.
Buhari has just implemented a naira redesign policy with a mere two weeks allowed for compliance, which fortuitously provides Chisom, an accountant, with access to a wealthy family whose inheritance from the oil boom of the 70s lies scattered in a room at their home. Chisom has to count all that money and exchange them for new notes. This is the big score that Boma, her lover, has been praying for. Hence the title: Love and New Notes.
Yet, not everything that glitters is gold. This house of money is haunted by the secrets of the past. And to discover those secrets, we unwittingly find ourselves in what feels like a completely different kind of Nollywood film—a recognisable old Nollywood movie, to be precise, but starring Odunlade Adekola, Eniola Badmus, and Toluwani George—complete with a surface-level interest in infertility and barrenness, and the stereotypical evil, vengeful wife who blames her husband for the actions she eagerly pushed him into in her own desperation.
If I had a coin for every time a Nollywood theatrical release had a “Sarah-Abraham-Hagar love triangle ghost story” in the last half-year, I would have two coins. That’s not many coins, but it is weird that it’s happened twice. And the weirdness is not lost on the minds behind these films, either, because even they cannot figure out how to be normal about it.
In Idia, released in October 2025, the concept is situated within a cultural and spiritual setting with incoherent in-world rules, executed with horror sensibilities, and performed with theatrics that almost feel comical. In Love and New Notes, the concept is situated within a cultural and spiritual setting with non-existent in-world rules, executed with horror sensibilities, and performed with a theatrical tone that definitely feels comical. And that tonal confusion is a major problem with Love and New Notes.
What even is this film’s genre? What it is not is a romance comedy, or a romance drama, or even a romance at all, despite what the marketing, the engagement scene, and the trumped-up declaration of love in the final act might suggest. But it’s hard to tell if this is a comedy or a drama, a thriller or a horror, a heist movie or a social issues drama. Perhaps, this is supposed to be Nollywood’s answer to the demand for genre blending. Well, it’s no delight to say, but the genres do not blend.
The ambition cannot be denied, though. Love and New Notes wants to be different. It wants to be bold. It wants to be socially and culturally relevant. If only it had clarity of vision, it might have accomplished some of these goals. If only this film—or Nollywood, in general—cared about the philosophical underpinnings of its thematic choices.
Instead, it cares more about aesthetics, in whatever form and shape it can achieve. In this film, disability is used as aesthetics. And so is the very concept of a period drama. The film has no sense of place, nor do the characters possess the language of the time. In fact, about half of the film is a flashback to at least two decades prior, but it makes no substantial difference. Indeed, if you took this film out of its time period and placed it in more modern times, the only thing that would change would be the vintage props.
And maybe, intentionally or inadvertently, that says something about Nigeria’s dysfunction. During Buhari’s stint as military head of state from 1983 to 1985, his currency change and import restriction policies resulted in both economic and non-economic difficulties. And in his time as civilian president between 2015 and 2023, his currency change and import restriction policies resulted in both economic and non-economic difficulties. There is even an early scene in the film where a cab driver briefly decries the irresponsibility of such callous governmental action, a condition that persists in present-day Nigeria. But that is as far as Love and New Notes goes with its attempt at political commentary.
What taking the film out of its time period would actually do would be to show how inconsequential that time period is, beyond someone wanting to make a period piece. But what does it profit the industry to direct all those resources into creating a half-baked world that the film does not even need?
Well, maybe it does profit the industry, if the box office numbers are anything to go by. But Kasum and Egbuson have already established themselves as the owners of the cinematic season of love. It seems very likely that a Love and New Notes set in the 2020s would still be a big score.
Rating: 2/5
*Love and New Notes premiered in Nigerian cinemas on 13th February 2026.
Vivian Nneka Nwajiaku is a writer, film critic, TV lover, and occasional storyteller writing from Lagos. She has a master’s degree in law but spends most of her time watching, reading about and discussing films and TV shows. She’s particularly concerned about what art has to say about society’s relationship with women. Connect with her on X @Nneka_Viv