Korede Azeez embraces heavy themes in her works. Her 2023 short, Halima’s Choice, a part of the African Folktales Reimagined anthology, takes us through love and loss in a futuristic world. In the first half of 2024, she released her first feature-length film, It Blooms In June, mixing loss with fatherhood in a feel-good plot. In her latest, With Difficulty Comes Ease, produced by Nemsia Studios, the Enugu-raised filmmaker draws inspiration from her multicultural upbringing to tell an emotional story about womanhood, religion and the bonds we make and break in life.

With Difficulty Comes Ease follows a young widow married into a Muslim family, painfully readjusting to life after her husband’s death. Uzoamaka Aniunoh (A Quiet Monday) takes the lead as Zainab, the widowed Igbo-Hausa woman. During this mourning period, she has to navigate a relationship with her petulant mother-in-law Hajiya (played by the unforgettable Ummi Baba-Ahmed) and a potential new love, Rayyan (Caleb Richards), with whom she forms a complicated and satisfying friendship.

When her husband, Qasim, passes away suddenly, Zainab who had already lost several pregnancies to miscarriage finds herself completely alone. Like her father who converted to marry the woman he loves, Zainab has chosen the same path, consequently creating a chasm between her and her family. Now, Zainab lives with her mother-in-law in the family house. Both widowed, they have a duty to their faith and marriage. Their shared pain doesn’t draw them to each other but heightens the tension in their relationship further. This is achieved in a way that doesn’t romanticise or over-paint the animosity between these two widows. We can easily lift Zainab from the film and place her off-screen in a random conservative religious home with a cranky mother-in-law and her fate won’t change. In this state of grief and loneliness, she begins to mend her fractured relationship with her elder sister, Nene (Michelle Dede). 

Zainab is trudging along. Her days are dulled by her grief on one hand and on the other, she has a mother in-law who finds her repulsive. In a key scene, Zainab tells her sister, “She hardly looks at me. It’s how bad I irritate her.” Azeez uses slow close-ups and non-dialogue to capture the heartache swelling inside of Zainab. To preserve her dead husband’s legacy, she begins a quest to revive the fabric business run solely by Qasim. To her dismay, the enterprise is riddled with debt and mismanagement of funds. 

These new discoveries about her late husband complicate things for her, making her question the lives they’ve both led. With a continuous sombre atmosphere and negative space, the director captures the inner turmoil of a grieving woman questioning her life, her body, and the things she seemingly sacrificed for the man she loved. She runs the gamut of hopeless emotions without veering into melodramatic territory while also depicting Hajiya as an older widowed Hausa wife burdened with heartache, resentment and righteous indignation. 

Even at the film’s most fraught, the director ensures a grounded realism sustains the feelings and emotions on display and it’s a testament to the actors’ brilliance that they are able to fill a space with such conflicting, overwrought emotions —aided by few cuts to enhance the drama. These scenes are allowed to build up, combust and breathe again in the aftermath of Zainab and Rayyan’s perils that people, who were once strangers, are now bonded by their shared grief. Still under Azeez’s more assured direction, Uzoamaka Aniunoh brings a level of intensity and eloquence, that even her silence conveys feelings more vividly than words would. Likewise, Umma Baba-Ahmed and Caleb Richards, fresh from Beyond The Veil, deliver solid performances. 

Taking a look at loss in Azeez’s works, if it’s not a father grappling with the loss of his wife and teenage daughter’s innocence, it would be a bleak love affair in a futuristic society. With Difficulty Comes Ease takes the subject more seriously this time. It deftly deviates from being about a widow suffering at the hands of her inlaws which is quite often within the “widow and wicked mother-in-law” Nollywood trope. Here, it is not just the widow who is going through the ache of a loss. There are other characters on this journey in their own way. Zainab and her mother-in-law stand out because they are both strong women who have lost the same thing(s) and dealing with the pain in their own ways. 

I think part of the reason this film feels precious is in its plain honesty and mundanity. It tackles grief in a purposefully dull yet profound way that doesn’t scream for your attention but finds a way to reward your interest in it at the end.

The film’s title is inspired by a verse in the Quran. So, it’s not surprising that it has a didactic ring. With Difficulty Comes Ease is a sometimes devastating examination of domesticity, marriage and even subtle and obvious islamophobia. The film takes us on a meditative journey of what it means to be a young, widowed, Muslim wife and how certain systems rise against women in the society. Through these themes, the director articulates Zainab’s grief with enormous depth. Her friendship with Rayyan helps her to cope and somehow find herself. This, I believe, serves as an introspection into the themes of alienation and otherness that run through the film. They are both Igbo and like Zainab, Rayyan carries the weight of conflicting identity.

However, this film, also written by Azeez, requires a lot of patience from you for at least more than a couple of thirty minutes as it burns slowly. Perhaps, it is a deliberate ploy so that the tension builds or perhaps not, seeing that there’s no explosive action or cathartic end and it doesn’t pretend to have one. The energy of this film comes from its quiet intensity. Almost nothing is loud or abrupt. But it hums restlessly with measured anxiety and taut dialogue dripping with social commentary. With tenderness and care, Korede Azeez has created a thoroughly modern, relevant and poignant story that captures the complexities of grief and human strength in the face of an overwhelming loss.

With Difficulty Comes Ease premiered on Prime Video on August 1, 2024.

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Side Musings

• In earlier scenes, Hajiya is depicted as a woman who barely understands English such that Zainab used a Google translator to communicate with her. But in later scenes, we see her suddenly converse in fluent English.
• Rayyan asking for something more than their friendship from Zainab, a widow still in mourning, is a contrast to his devotion to the Muslim faith he upholds.
• For someone who converted to Islam to be with her heartthrob, Zainab does not show any conscious effort to learn the Hausa language.
• The inclusion of Abuja street signs added a layer of authenticity and sentimentality to the film’s setting.

Correction (08.08): Zainab’s father is not Hausa.