We are first introduced to Lagos through the eyes of Lady (Jessica Gabriel’s Ujah) and everything is upside down. It’s not a projection error! The image flips and gravity returns. Two young girls are letting their heads loll backwards over the edge of a jetty, rendering the pastoral vision behind them the wrong way up. This idyll does not last long. One slammed door later and Lady — as a young adult — fills the frame. She is living in the same place, it’s the dream that has shifted.

Nigerian-British writer/director Olive Nwosu, aided by cinematographer Alana Mejia Gonzalez, starts her career with a fully-formed sense of image-craft. The most enduring moments in her first feature “Lady” stem from a visual power. A widescreen 2:1 aspect ratio is maximized to shoot the over-populated highways of a city home to over 17 million souls, yet there is grace in the gridlock. With a shrewd eye for color and detail, Nwosu does for Lagos what Payal Kapadia did for Mumbai in “All We Imagine As Light,” finding the secret rhythms within a chaotic city.

But this is a boldly aestheticized genre film – and while there are serene moments where the camera takes the position of god overlooking an anthill, much of the film takes place after-hours with the camera drawn to individuals and small groups. Under the glow of car headlamps or club strobe lights, sex workers look like flocks of high-femme birds of paradise. By contrast, Lady holds fast to masculine clothing in the hope of going under the radar and staying in control of her destiny. Gender presentation as a theme is suggested, rather than explicated, by the yin-yang survival modes pursued by Lady and her oldest friend Pinky (Amanda Oruh), the other girl in the opening sequence.

Pinky’s return after an abrupt departure many years prior presents Lady with an opportunity to earn more than the living she is scraping as a taxi driver. Fuel prices are skyrocketing and increasing numbers of Lady’s driver colleagues are heeding the voice of DJ Revolution — a charismatic radio personality — and taking to the streets in protest. Used to being a lone wolf, a woman in a man’s world, a solo grafter while collective dissent brews, Lady turns the other cheek and accepts Pinky’s proposition to moonlight as a driver for sex workers.

For Lady has one simple dream and it is fully dependent on accruing funds. One wall of her shack is plastered with images of Freetown, Sierra Leone. Behind one tenuously attached photo ripped from a magazine, there is a hole in the wall where she keeps her life savings in cash. Just as Rita Hayworth in “The Shawshank Redemption” was a vulnerable guard against Andy’s one shot at freedom, so too the words ‘WISH YOU WERE HERE’ over an azure sea induce anxiety — it’s a flimsy front for such a precious stash.

If the stakes laid out for Lady are simple enough, Nwosu saves complexity in her sketch of a city vast enough that a person could lose track of their dreams by sheer dint of distraction; the day-to-day business of survival slowly eroding anything more high-minded on the horizon. One of the ways that Lady keeps focused is by fiercely rapping to herself in the mirror; she is, she tells herself, “the boss”. Whether the film agrees is something that Nwosu keeps close to her chest.

Working with many first time actors, Nwosu draws out commanding performances, even if these are limited by the loose personas within her writing. The actors give committed emotional performances that suit the stylistic visuals, without emerging as fully-formed characters. Jessica Gabriel’s Ujah holds the film together with a seething charisma, while butting up against an underwritten origin-story of her sexual phobia. Her traumatic memories, triggered by spying on the sex workers, sit on the surface; without nuanced rooting in the story, they function only as jagged atmospheric flourishes, detached from deeper significance. 

Yet, these limits have little chance to grate, so compelling is the vision that Nwosu has conjured. Individual scenes are directed with a flair for beat-by-beat menace and reprieve, and she avoids many of the traps that a less confident filmmaker would have dutifully entered. Nwosu has a refined ability to present alternating perspectives without tipping the scales on one or the other. There is a strong sense of duality throughout: characters code-switch between Nigerian and Pidgin, the soundtrack juggles tense strings with rap music, Lady balances the masculine and feminine, while the theme of individualism vs collectivism bubbles on the backburner.

If “Lady” is more successful as a series of interconnected vignettes, than as one fluid narrative, it has a moving ending up its sleeve. After presenting a morass of rich themes, Nwosu teases out a small, surprising finale that transcends the blinkered concerns driving her protagonist. ‘WISH YOU WERE HERE’ is an entreaty to audiences on behalf of the cinematic and social movements of Lagos today.

Grade: B

“Lady” premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

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