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There is a particular kind of person every Nigerian family has. the one who pays school fees, settles hospital bills, bails out failing businesses, and still shows up to Christmas celebrations with a cooler full of jollof rice and groundnut oil. Nollywood has always known this person exists. What it hasn’t done is sit with them long enough to ask: what does it cost?
That is the question at the heart of Behind the Scenes, co-directed by Funke Akindele and Tunde Olaoye and released on December 12, 2025, and for the most part, it is a deeply human one.
Funke Akindele, who has arguably the most consistent commercial run in Nollywood history from Battle on Buka Street (2022), through A Tribe Called Judah (2023), and Everybody Loves Jenifa (2024), returns with something more personal.
The story centres on Aderonke “Ronky-Fella” Faniran, a Lagos real estate business mogul whose endless generosity had quietly become everyone else’s entitlement. When the emotional weight grows unbearable, Ronke makes a radical decision; she fakes her own death to see who truly loves her.
Scarlet Gomez carries the film with a quiet, controlled sadness that immediately draws the audience in. She plays Ronke not as a saint but as a woman who has confused self-sacrifice with self-worth, a distinction the film subtly gestures at but rarely explores with enough depth.
When she is on screen, you feel the film’s emotional weight. When the camera turns elsewhere, that weight tends to dissolve. The ensemble, which includes Iyabo Ojo, Ini Dima-Okojie, Tobi Bakre, and a particularly watchable Uche Montana, performs competently across the board, though no one is given the material to truly break out.
Technically, the film is polished as expected of Funke Akindele’s productions. The Lagos cityscapes are well-used, and the interiors feel lived-in rather than decorative. The film does stumble occasionally: heavy make-up in scenes that call for raw vulnerability, and product placements that arrive sometimes, with the subtlety of a billboard.
These are not new complaints about Nollywood, but from a filmmaker of Akindele’s stature, they feel like missed opportunities rather than forgivable limitations.
What Behind the Scenes does beautifully is trust its audience. Many Nigerians watching will not need the film to explain why Ronke cannot simply say no. They will feel it. The constant exhaustion of being the dependable one, the particular loneliness of generosity that has morphed into obligation. This is lived experience, and Akindele stages it with the confidence of someone who knows she is holding a mirror, not a magnifying glass.
The film’s title, it turns out, earns its meaning in the end. Ronke has spent her entire life as the silent engine behind everyone else’s story while remaining invisible in her own. The “behind the scenes” ruse she constructs is not just a plot device; it is a long-overdue act of clarity.
Behind the Scenes is not a perfect film. But it is a generous, emotionally honest one, and in the hands of Nigeria’s most bankable filmmaker, that generosity feels entirely earned.
Rating: 7/10