From Omeleto.
A new mother sees a friend.
ANGIE’S LOVE is used with permission from Bayo Lambo. Learn more at https://instagram.com/angiesloveshortfilm.
Angie is a young Nigerian mother who is visited by her friend Ama and another mutual acquaintance, Temi. Despite her husband’s disapproval, Angie receives her friends with graciousness, proud to show off her home and family.
The visit is strange and off-kilter in tone, though. But Angie persists in her poise and hospitality — until the reason for the visit unfolds and Angie’s situation is revealed in full.
Directed and written by Bayo Lambo, this haunting short drama from Nigeria is essentially a mystery, peeling away layer after layer until it reaches a piercingly wrought core. A masterful study in atmosphere, mystery and dramatic world-building, it erects a hermetic, almost impenetrable world around the main character and then punctures it to reveal a devastating truth.
The storytelling functions like a slow burn, beginning with an eerie, off-kilter tenor. As Angie sits, singing a lullaby to her baby, she has a tense exchange with her offscreen husband. The mood is uncanny and still, shrouded in a veil of visual haziness, and the long duration of the shots builds a sense of foreboding stasis. There isn’t much movement, light or sound in the frame, just a sense of a house cut off from outside reality.
The film’s distinctively uncomfortable visual strategies become even more pointed and even surreal when Angie’s friends arrive, ominously masked and emerging out of the blinding brightness. The deliberately rigid framing emphasizes that this isn’t a friendly tete-a-tete, as does the dialogue, which is awkward and uncertain — not what you’d expect between a new mother and her friends. Ama is hesitant and feeling Angie out, but Angie persists in portraying a new matriarch in full bloom, taking care to offer refreshments, even as her friends complain of the stifling heat. But Angie’s queenly dignity and poise only concerns Ama more, who gets increasingly desperate and reveals her agenda for the visit: she wants Angie to come back with her to London, but Angie won’t hear of it, refusing to leave her home and family.
As Angie, actor Toni Tones treads a difficult line, hinting that there is more underneath the surface of her character without revealing it fully. In many ways, Tones’s performance is in itself a performance: of a regal and proud young mother to a child she has fought and longed for, defensive of her home and child. As Ama and the proxy for the audience, actor Folu Storms grows increasingly frantic to pierce Angie’s shell. But that shell proves impervious, much to Ama’s agony.
Risk-taking and masterfully told, ANGIE’S LOVE reveals its mystery eventually, in a vivid and visceral scene that deploys its quicker pace and more muscular visuals to a heart-wrenching conclusion. In the end, we understand Angie’s implacable demeanor and the love and tragedy that fuels it. We understand, all too well, why a mind simply refuses to move on — because to face what happened would only crack Angie open beyond repair. Instead, she leaves herself in a place that only she and her baby can occupy, out of reach from the outside world’s harsh light.
