Meet the Khumalos is not to be taken seriously, as the film hardly ever takes itself seriously.
By Joseph Jonathan
The trope of clashing families and forbidden love is no stranger to cinema across the world. In fact, you could say it is now rather overbeaten. From Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), Monster-in-Law (2005), Guess Who (2005), You Again (2010), The Wedding Party (2016), and Crazy Rich Asians (2018), filmmakers have long mined the tension between love and family pride for both drama and comedy.
In South African cinema, Jayan Moodley tapped into this formula to great success with her directorial debut, Keeping Up with the Kandasamys (2017). Her latest offering, Meet the Khumalos, revisits this familiar terrain with a fresh set of characters and a glossy new neighborhood but in a rather unspectacular fashion.
At the heart of the story is Bongi (Ayanda Borotho), a spirited tour guide who moves her family from the suburbs to a luxurious gated estate, only to find that her next-door neighbour is none other than her childhood best friend turned nemesis, Grace (Khanyi Mbau). The two women clash immediately as old wounds and class tensions erupting into passive-aggressive warfare. But the real kicker? Grace’s son, Sizwe (Jesse Suntele) and Bongi’s daughter, Sphe (Khosi Ngema), are secretly in love.
While Meet the Khumalos starts off as a comedy of manners (or rather, a comedy of no manners in a community obsessed with order), it quickly pivots. The central conflict, which is the battle of wills between Grace and Bongi, gets sidelined in favor of the star-crossed romance. That’s not a bad thing in itself.
The forbidden love trope is tried and tested. But unlike in Kandasamys, where the romance drives the story and the maternal rivalry responds to it, here the pivot feels less like a narrative decision and more like a rescue plan for a conflict that ran out of gas halfway through. As the subplot quickly becomes the main plot, it makes the earlier comedy of conflict feel more like a filler than the actual foundation.
Unfortunately, there lies the film’s biggest issue. Meet the Khumalos has all the ingredients for a compelling dramedy, but not enough attention is paid to the flavours. Supporting characters are introduced with comic potential but then abandoned abruptly.
Grace’s mother-in-law is a paper-thin device, used solely to amplify Grace’s cartoonishly dramatic persona, a deliberate caricature, but one that lacks the depth to be memorable. Similarly, Bongi’s youngest daughter floats in and out of scenes without any meaningful contribution, at some point it seems like she just vanished into oblivion.
The husbands, who are secretly friends themselves, offer a glimmer of unexplored potential. Their secret meetings over drinks and football, hidden from their dominating wives, could’ve offered rich comic material or a more nuanced take on masculine friendship under patriarchal performance.
It’s a missed opportunity, especially when the script briefly toys with the idea that these men must sneak off to drink and watch football in secret, as if they’re cheating, not on their wives, but on the domestic order they uphold.
This lack of character depth is felt most in the emotional arc. Kandasamys succeeds by grounding its melodrama in cultural specificity: Durban’s Indian-South African community is vivid, lived-in, and central to the humour.
By contrast, Meet the Khumalos is more of a global Netflix comedy in tone, stripped of distinct local flavour in favor of exportable relatability. Aside from a few nods to Umemulo (a traditional Zulu coming of age ceremony for women) and culture clash, there’s little anchoring this story to South Africa.
The result is a film that could have happened anywhere — which is both a strength and a weakness. Universality sells, but specificity is what makes you unique because it stays with you.
At some point while watching the film, One begins to wonder why it was titled Meet the Khumalos. One would expect that a film with such a title would probably revolve around a dysfunctional family but the film hardly revolves around the Khumalo family. Instead it focuses mostly on the unresolved trauma and feuding that Grace and Bongi share. It is what unites them in their quest to sabotage their children’s relationship because who would want their child fraternising with the “enemy”?
That said, Meet the Khumalos is not without its charm. The jokes which sometimes fall between cringe and slapstick, land more often than not, and the cast bring an infectious energy despite a lazily written plot. Mbau is especially fun to watch, embracing Grace’s theatricality with no fear of being too much.
She understands the tone the film is going for: absurd, and sometimes ridiculous. Borotho, on the other hand, balances her with a grounded yet stubborn portrayal of Bongi, making their dynamic fun to watch. The young couple, while not breaking new ground, brings enough warmth to keep the audience invested in their fate.
In the end, Meet the Khumalos is a serviceable, if safe, feel-good film that leans into familiar tropes without necessarily reinventing them. It feels like the textbook South African Netflix rom-com: a romance, throw in a family somewhere, some Zulu, views of the coast and call it a day. Meet the Khumalos is not to be taken seriously, as the film hardly ever takes itself seriously.
Rating: 1.5/5
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.