Micheal Ndiomu alludes to the concept of “cinema faces”—peculiar figures whose presence alone can summon footfall to the cinema—through the character Erastus Okpanachi in his feature directorial debut, Headless. As I sat in my empty cinema hall in the highly populated city of Kaduna, the twofold nature of Ndiomu’s deliberate rejection of “cinema faces” had germinated in my heart, namely, an absence of audience feedback and the solitude of two hours spent in a dark, expansive room. It is not that the actors in Headless are unknown, nor that they have never been watched by cinema audiences, but that none function as conventional audience magnets. However, the mere presence of cinema faces does not constitute a sufficient condition for a good film, and Headless stands as proof.
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Ndiomu (a producer on The Origin: Madam Koi-Koi) directs his indictment towards a constellation of social formations—the bourgeoisie, politicians, bureaucratic authority, and the Nollywood system itself—a critique catalyzed by the film’s plot in which Erastus (a struggling film producer played with comical flair by Gideon Okeke) is caught with irrefutable evidence in a Nollywood actress’s murder which drags him into corruption’s depths. In this way, narrative, spectatorship, and social commentary intertwine, producing a cinema that interrogates audience expectation, power, and the industrial workings of Nollywood, revealing its mechanics and hierarchies—a gesture of meta-cinema.
One of the prescriptions Erastus receives on making a cinema film is to use specific actors regarded as “cinema faces,” leading to a connection with the murdered actress. Across critical discourse and audience reception, Nollywood’s recycling of familiar faces has been widely observed. This dialogue extends elsewhere, namely, the exaggerated involvement of digitally prominent social media influencers and skitmakers as actors, of which a notable decline has been visible recently. Headless premiered at AFRIFF in 2024 as the opening film, and only reached cinemas nearly two years later in March 2026, with distribution by FilmOne Entertainment. Insofar as Headless embodies the constraints of the system it critiques, one might speculate that a distribution deal could have materialized earlier, had it featured “cinema faces.”
As critics have argued, and in the spirit of Godard, cinema should be aware of itself; films can expose industry norms rather than hide them behind illusion. Headless operates with this awareness; the mechanics of two distinct, occasionally overlapping industries—”Nollytube” and “Nollywood”—are revealed. From Enugu, Erastus works within the segment of Nigerian cinema that has adopted YouTube as its primary, perhaps only distribution platform. Now in Lagos, disillusioned with his current place in the industry, he seeks to make his breakthrough in the hostile landscapes of Nollywood. He is ceaselessly astonished by the structural differences—expensive high-end equipment and bureaucratic structures such as distributors—compared to the overtly DIY processes of his former industry.
Erastus recounts Nollytube’s mechanics to Onome, a young police officer played with youthful mischief by a striking Gbubemi Ejeye (Farmer’s Bride); one that required him to take on multiple key roles on a single project, notably directing, producing, and editing. The problematic nature of this process emerges in Onome’s response, “shouldn’t all those be done by different people?” Erastus attributes this to economic constraints, explaining that what Onome perceives as growth—of hundreds of thousands of views—amounts to nothing. Such visibility would only become meaningful if multiplied across several channels. This context is the basis of Nollytube’s quantity-oriented production logic: visibility and volume equal greater profit.
To think of Erastus as our sole protagonist does a disservice to the film’s inherent ensemble logic, and to call it otherwise is to misinterpret the director’s vision—the film is, after all, marketed as Erastus’s story. Both doom and redemption hinge upon a woman in the course of Ersatus’s journey. Through his association with Omolara—played by Ruby Okezie, who gives a rather ghostly performance; the character who is dead from the very beginning and appears only through memories—he becomes embroiled in murder accusations. Feminist critics such as Laura Mulvey and Molly Haskell have observed that cinema frequently represents women not as they are, but as a man would have them be.
Through Omolara, this dynamic is reproduced. A supposed A-list actor—“cinema face”—goes to the negotiation table, not with professional credibility or artistic authority, but with a condescendingly objectifying rhetoric, “look at me; do you know how much it takes to manage this?” She also functions as a mole for a corrupt lawyer to his political employer. With Omolara, Ndiomu crafts an undignified female character who operates less as narrative agent than as an iconic figure, arranged for spectacle and utility—a tool for Erastus’s eventual breakthrough, the lawyer’s revenge, and the politician’s sexual gratification—in a manner consistent with Laura Mulvey’s account of the female image in classical cinema.
It would be premature to cast stones at Ndiomu for this apparent instrumentalization of the female figure, that being, for the narrative-driving presence of Inspector Gofwan, rendered indelibly through a performance of rare force and autonomy by the formidable Uzuoamaka Power (fka Aniunoh). Inspector Gofwan is the driving force of truth in Headless, transcending institutional limitations, corrupt superiors, and the missteps of a faltering ally in Erastus. Even so, she is constrained by an implicit logic: the culturally coded idea that “good women are conservative.” Inspector Gofwan is very young yet disinclined to juvenile theatrics: she doesn’t understand the value of 200K YouTube views, doesn’t use instagram, but facebook. Omolara and Gofwan collectively gesture toward a Mulveyan binary of female virtue and vice, but such a reading is an overreach. Gofwan resists a purely moralistic simplification; she achieves her victory not through moral purity, but through a calculated engagement with the corrupt structures around her. Yet one cannot deny that Gofwan is virtuous. Cast your stones now, if you may, but it is not far-fetched to suggest that Ndiomu has pitched Omolara’s redemption, through inspector Gofwan, as far as a man can apprehend the depths of womanhood.
The camera in Headless is as restless as its subjects. Scenes in the interrogation room for instance are largely shot using a 360-degree rotating camera—sometimes a true rotation, sometimes simulated by stitching consecutive shots to maintain continuous motion—producing a disorienting effect that mirrors the scene’s tension. This restlessness extends beyond form, as its thesis of systemic ruin under social-political and economic pressures. Political rottenness manifests through Senator Izu (Femi Branch), of a bourgeois politician fronting an organ-harvesting factory as a meat factory; the complicity of DSP Agba (Segun Arinze) in the implication and attempted murder of a falsely accused man; through Lanre (Baaj Adebule), a lawyer, who weaponizes documentation and steals signatures to exact revenge on his corrupt superior. The world of Headless—more or less reflecting Nigerian society—is riddled with rottenness. These are not anomalies; Ndiomu stages destruction as the inevitable aftermath of systemic decay. All the symbols of ruin are brought to justice by younger, more principled members of the system. To state Ndiomu’s stance explicitly, “the youth is the future.”
The peak of an otherwise brilliant screenplay, marked by its obvious representational missteps, is the first interrogation scene. It unfolds as a clash of social voices: the inspector Gofwan speaks English with institutional authority, while Erastus shifts between English, Pidgin, and Igbo, moving between formal, to conversational, and foundational vulnerability. In this layering of languages, the scene evokes Bakhtinian heteroglossia, suggesting that meaning emerges from the interplay of distinct social and emotional registers. Formality, familiarity, and instinct coexist, through Erasmus’s speech, each representing a distinct mode of being understood: English asserts, “understand me, I am formal”; Pidgin indicates, “understand me, I am familiar; Igbo admits “understand me, I am vulnerable.”
I would like to be permitted to impose meaning on the final scene, in which Erastus directs a film—an ode to the Nigerian cineaste. Inasmuch as the industry remains unstable and riddled with systemic challenges, the Nigerian filmmaker continues, inexhaustibly, to make films.
Headless is produced by Marturion Films and Display Studios, premiered in cinemas on March 13.
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Side Musings
- There are a handful of meta—self-referential—moments, sprinkled across, easy to misread as mediocre. But for their context, contradictions, and loose distribution across the film, can be read as deliberate. They include:
- The policemen who find the head in Erastus’s trunk are hyper-theatrical and indulgent—exaggerated expressions, they joke about Erastus not wanting them to share food from the cooler—it is a head inside. An instinctive remark while watching might be, “poor acting,” but if you go on the internet and watch videos of the Nigerian police doing a search, you’d agree with me that it’s more of satire.
- During senator Izu’s overthrow, his bodyguard—shot by one of Lanre’s allies—utters “I’ve been shot” before collapsing hysterically. This is classic Nolly(Tube) overacting. It also snaps any established realism, and reminds you this is, after all, a Nollywood film.
- On their first encounter, Lanre visits Erasmus in police custody, explains to him that the situation is orchestrated, and offers him less sufferable, but ridiculous alternatives. Lanre tops this off by telling him, “this is not Nollywood.”
- Wanting to use a “cinema face” is what led to Erasmus’s misfortunes. A reading of “cinema faces” being a problematic concept can be applied to this.
- Moses Babatope’s (CEO, The Nile Entertainment) guest appearance as a dismissive distributor invokes the growing tension between Nigerian filmmakers and distributors.
- Erasmus is told that he needs better equipment to make a cinema film, but what we are shown is a space full of C Stands. Any NollyTube production insider please, it has come to my notice that you do not use C stands, what do you use in place of them?
