Blackout might not be entirely plausible, but it still very much feels like a film made by a filmmaker who knows exactly the kind of film he wants to make.
By Vivian Nneka Nwajiaku
A Youth Corp member, or a corper as Nigerians prefer to call them, arrives at a new locality on their National Youth Service assignment. Very quickly, they stumble into unusual circumstances and strange occurrences, sometimes physical but mostly spiritual or psychological. An abandoned shrine, a series of death, and eerie customs that threaten both the corper’s life and sanity.
We have seen it before, probably more often on Nollywood screens than in real life. Popular examples include Kunle Afolayan’s The Figurine: Araromire (2009), Tolu “Lordtanner” Awobiyi’s Ajuwaya: The Haunted Village (2017), and James Abinibi’s Miss PJ (2024). Blackout (2025) joins the genre, flying under the radar in this season of Valentine-backed romance movies.
In Blackout, directed by Okechukwu “Okey” Oku (Black Rose (2018); Levi (2019); Strained (2023)) a woman wakes up one morning to a family she does not know in a home she does not recognise in a town she only visited as a corper. She finds herself thrown into a fight for her life, to break out of a reality she never chose, and return to the world she remembers.
At first, Blackout starts off with romance, as Judith (Padita Agu, convincing at each turn), dressed in an NYSC uniform, is dropped off by her fiancé, Ken (a composed Blossom Chukwujekwu), at a park in Ebonyi where she takes a bus to Enugu to report to her place of primary assignment.
This is a one-year assignment, and even though they are both in Eastern Nigeria, the newly-engaged, eager-to-wed couple will be apart for quite some time. So, a good portion of the first act is dedicated to establishing their relationship.
Neither of them is particularly young, but they really are young lovers at heart; theirs is the kind of lovey-dovey that crosses from cheesy to cringe. Hawkers stare at them in admiration of their public display of affection. They almost have to be begged to move it along so the bus can hit the road. And after Judith arrives at Enugu, they won’t get off each other’s phone: You hang up; No, you hang up first.
It seems impossible that either of them can live without the other, until evil eyes catch her in Enugu, when a fellow corper named Johnson (Nelson Iwu, cruising through his role), who also teaches at the school she has been assigned to, introduces her to a local business owner named Dan (Gideon Okeke, switching personalities with fascinating ease). Something changes. Her life stops.
Blackout opens with Judith waking up to a nightmare. There is a little boy calling her mummy and waiting to be taken to school. There is a child crying and a man demanding that she does something about their child disturbing his precious sleep. There are paintings of her on the wall and drawers filled with clothes that look like they may be hers. Nothing looks even vaguely familiar to her. So great is her bewilderment that the first words out of her usually conservative mouth are: “Who the fuck are these people?”
As her mind swirls as she searches for answers, so do ours. Blackout excels at keeping the audience on their toes, wondering and guessing, tortured by the suspense. Is it all staged? If she has truly been kidnapped as the synopsis already established, how hard can it be for her psychopathic captor to kidnap two kids to create his picture-perfect family? After all, those paintings on the wall can easily be arranged by a person who may have been stalking his victim.
But also, her apparent captor appears just as confused, with an anxiety that rivals Judith’s. When he grabs the children and drops them off with their grandmother, explaining that something is wrong with his wife, he believes it. Could he also be a pawn in somebody’s twisted idea of a game? Where is the fiancé in all of this?
Blackout answers these questions dutifully, gliding between timelines, often in bold chyrons at the bottom left of the screen specifying the time in relation to Judith’s period of unconsciousness. When she departs Ebonyi for Enugu, it is nine days before the blackout, and when she wakes up to a strange family, it is about an hour after the blackout.
When the film goes back in time, the picture transitions into black and white before settling back into colour, a surprising but effective touch that serves to distinguish timelines but also highlights shifts in tone.
It is a technical choice that signifies the director’s commitment to the genre, an understanding of the spirit of the psychological thriller. It’s evident in the sound design, handled by Oku himself, in the ominous score (by Charles “Onyebeat” Onwubuya, who previously worked with Oku on Strained) that dances between melancholy and terror, in the selection of songs with titles like Reaper and Spiritual.
Reaper, in particular, an original song by David Onka, plays in one spellbinding scene where Dan falls asleep on a couch in his living room, night beautifully and expertly transitioning into day–the lighting is superb–while an unseen ritual goes on in the bedroom where we know Judith lies unconscious. It is such an ordinary but menacing song; it will likely be the soundtrack that keeps me awake on nights with looming deadlines.
Blackout does not care much for aesthetics, with mixed results. The release poster is boring. The locations are real and unvarnished. The special effects makeup is well done, but the regular makeup is not.
And the film abstains from the sin of excess. Well, mostly. There is a disturbing scene where an unconscious Judith is sexually assaulted, the one scene that the film could have easily done without (unwarranted gender-based violence scenes are becoming more abundant in Nollywood), even though the film’s entire premise is a woman having to get out of a life and relationship that she has been trapped in without her consent.
Other than this problematic lapse, whatever is not essential does not make it onscreen. And, unfortunately, even some essentials do not. There are hints that Judith is not the first woman to suffer this experience.
Early in the film, in a remarkably cinematographed establishing sequence that follows Judith and Johnson through a market until they arrive at Dan’s shop for the first time, the camera focuses on a series of identical posters of a missing woman.
It looks too deliberate and too intense to be a coincidence, and when a warning is issued later on in the film that previous mistakes must not be repeated, there is no reason not to make a connection. But the film itself never does. Who is the missing woman? What happened the last time? Those are questions that remain unanswered.
There is also the question of whether Blackout even occurs in the same reality that the audience lives in, with instances where characters fail to take obvious actions that real human beings would take.
Particularly, there is a hectic sequence where Ken, goes on an arduous search for his fiancée in Enugu but never so much as produces a picture of her or of the both of them together. He does not even check out the school where she is supposed to be working.
To explain might equate to a spoiler, but suffice to say that a visit to the school would have led him to Johnson which could have led to a discovery of Judith’s situation, and a picture would have saved us all a lot of time.
But then, would we have had this film if common sense prevailed? Perhaps not. And it is a film worth having. Blackout might not be entirely plausible, but it still very much feels like a film made by a filmmaker who knows exactly the kind of film he wants to make.
Rating: 3/5
(Blackout premiered in Nigerian cinemas in February 2025.)
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 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 Twitter @Nneka_Viv