{"id":1693411,"date":"2026-09-18T10:00:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-18T14:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/observer.com\/?p=1693411"},"modified":"2026-09-16T16:56:53","modified_gmt":"2026-09-16T20:56:53","slug":"review-movies-tiff-arie-chuko-esiri-clarissa-sophie-okonedo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/observer.com\/2026\/09\/review-movies-tiff-arie-chuko-esiri-clarissa-sophie-okonedo\/","title":{"rendered":"Screening at TIFF: Arie and Chuko Esiri\u2019s \u2018Clarissa\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Sophie Okonedo in Clarissa<\/em>. Courtesy TIFF<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It’s been an exceptional year for filmmakers transposing Mrs. Dalloway<\/i> to modernity. The Tribeca Festival played host to The Last Day<\/i><\/a> by Rachel Rose, a loose, impressionistic echo of Virginia Woolf’s 1925 classic. Meanwhile, Cannes and Toronto saw brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri expand on the story in a contemporary Nigerian setting with Clarissa<\/i>, an invigorating film containing some of the year’s finest cinematic sleight of hand, and its most captivating performances.<\/p>\n

Novelistic and abstruse, Clarissa<\/i>\u2014named for Woolf’s nostalgic middle-aged socialite, Clarissa Dalloway\u2014unfolds with the very same stream-of-consciousness telling as the original text, a cinematic feat that is, by its nature, opaque. It yields, however, a cinematic vitality. Tracing the who’s who (and who’s when) of the flashback structure requires attention to details like casting and costumes, since the fleeting, casual dialogue mentions characters’ names only in passing, and the visual language is rarely aimed at creating connections between the timelines. The result, courtesy of Chuko Esiri’s immensely thoughtful scripting, is a lean-forward experience of unraveling knotty curiosities, which the movie’s ensemble brings to life in apparent vignettes slowly woven together\u2014not just by the film’s own editing, but by our own synaptic connections, formed to fit the story into a familiar shape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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CLARISSA <\/i><\/b>\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605 (<\/b>4\/4 stars<\/i><\/b>)<\/b>
\n<\/b> Directed by: <\/b>Arie Esiri and Chuko Esiri
\nWritten by:<\/b> Chuko Esiri
\nStarring: <\/b>Sophie Okonedo, David Oyelowo, India Amarteifio, Toheeb Jimoh, Jude Akuwudike, Danny Sapani, Fortune Nwafor, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Joke Silva, Ayo Edebi
\nRunning time:<\/b> 134 min.<\/p>\n

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Like the novel, Clarissa<\/i> follows its eponymous fifty-something (played by Sophie Okonedo) preparing for a party over the course of a day, amid memories and chance encounters. Only the setting here is modern Lagos instead of 1920s London, a tilt-shift that requires little alteration beyond a few last names and some Nigerian Pidgin. Although the movie bides its time, a central scene nearly an hour in\u2014following younger versions of each character gathered for a fancy luncheon\u2014quickly crystallizes its themes of class and postcolonial identity, turning the very act of adapting an interwar English classic into a thorny perusal of the country’s complicated cultural inheritance, on par with Chinua Achebe’s great Nigerian novel Things Fall Apart<\/i><\/a>.<\/p>\n

The shadow of colonial Britain looms large over the movie’s telling, between its characters’ posh accents (which they note as a remnant of the crown) and the rigid hierarchies maintained and transformed to suit the status quo of power. However, these prickly hegemonies disguise character dynamics at turns passionate and conversational. In the present, Okonedo’s high-strung Clarissa alternates between genial and severe when instructing her staff, while several decades in the past (where she’s played by India Amarteifio), she comes off as a more thoughtful, bright-eyed character still on the precipice of hardening toward issues of class.<\/p>\n

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