“You’re a witch!” Imuetiyan, the film’s protagonist, blurts out during an emotionally charged argument with her mother (Mercy Aigbe). Unfazed by this accusation, her mother responds wryly that she is indeed a witch and she flies on a broom at night and sucks blood. As viewers, we find the mother’s retort funny, but the young Imuetiyan does not. Mercy Aigbe carries this scene with the electrifying precision of an angry Benin mother. Efe Irele, too, is convincingly youthful as the sharp-mouthed teenager (thanks to the hair department and colourist) played with all the rebellious energy of an adolescent she can muster. It is a defiance that has settled into a lump of grudge that sits on her chest by the time we meet her adult self.
Imuetiyan is thriving in the United Kingdom under the glamour of her fashion magazine job when we first meet her. She’s carved out a space for herself, far from the ghost of her past, when she gets an unsettling video message from a certain Doctor Ayo (Timini Egbuson in a refreshing departure). He comes bearing bad news for Imuetiyan: her mother has passed away. This is accompanied by a heartfelt video recording of Imuetiyan’s mother pleading for her to come back home and give her a befitting burial.
There’s no dramatic response from Imuetiyan. The film allows her to meditate on the present, but not too much to show that she cares. There’s no room for her to express grief or regret, and you can tell at that point that all is not right between mother and daughter. Instead, she retreats to the balcony to smoke, a habit that becomes a recurring motif in the film, you’ll see. Imuetiyan is sold by the video because you see her in the next scene, bidding goodbye to a colleague-friend at the airport, as her flight to Nigeria is announced. The lush landscape that welcomes Imuetiyan home is as evocative as the upbeat highlife music that follows it.
But Imuetiyan is not excited in the least about coming back home to this place and neither does she marvel at the beauty and change of everything in that effervescent way of Nigerians who have been away for too long. If anything, she wants to get over with the burial and fly back home. But not this home, here in Benin, with its unpleasant memories. Was this what the poet meant by how a place can hold so much beauty and sadness at the same time?
If she is not repulsed enough by the warm greetings of her extended family, Imuetiyan gets more offended by the next family member who comes to greet her at the doctor’s office—her supposed dead mother. It’s almost like an ambush. She is furious that she’d been lured home with a lie. She storms out. Outside, it is pouring heavily, but Imuetiyan prefers to be beaten by the rain rather than share the same space with her visibly sick mother. That is the depth of her resentment towards her mother.
Written and directed by Niyi Akinmolayan (The House of Secrets) for Anthill Studios and Frameflix, My Mother is a Witch explores the strained relationship between a deeply caring but passive-aggressive mother and her daughter (portrayed with a smoldering intensity by Efe Irele) who carries the trauma of their early struggles like a gaping wound that has not healed even after twelve years of distance. Adolescent girls are often in an open rebellion against their mothers; it’s almost like a rite of passage. Which is why you wonder what the big deal is between Imuetiyan and her mother that her long years of absence have not mended this rift between them. The film unfolds deliberately, peeling back layers of their past to unravel the root of their estrangement and the emotional complexities that surround it.
To director Akinmolayan’s credit, the film’s creative nonlinear structure—seamlessly shifting between past and present—mirrors, with sufficient clarity, the bitter memories haunting both women, a core technique in his 2023 neo-noir outing The House of Secrets. In both films, Akinmolayan employs nonlinear storytelling and expository framing, using flashbacks and dialogue to weave past events into the present narrative to illuminate his characters’ backstories. In the ambitious The House of Secrets, it hardly enjoys the smooth transition present in My Mother is a Witch.
While mirror shots are not typically Akinmolayan’s thing, he utilizes them here to reflect a character’s inner tension. In the third act’s poignant climax, the mother and daughter’s reconciliation is powerfully framed through a mirror. The sharp editing sustains this resonance with a taut narrative that avoids lingering too much; otherwise, it becomes mawkish.
Still, My Mother is a Witch sometimes leans towards gauzy sentimentality, risking an overly dramatic tone that could overshadow a nuanced exploration of its themes. However, the riveting performances of Mercy Aigbe and Efe Irele (a reunion after 2024’s Farmer’s Bride) keep the story grounded the entire time. Together, their mother-daughter scenes bleed raw honesty.
In all her loving, however, Imuetiyan’s mother is not entirely innocent. Her love and concern is clouded by her personal trauma, even if she doesn’t want to admit it. And it’s a good thing that the film doesn’t attempt to shield this from us. Instead, it leaves us with the question of how far is too far with parents who are morbidly afraid of watching their children become something they once were and the length they can go to stop that.
The film teases a romance between doctor Ayo (who takes on the role of a mediator and comforter) and Imuetiyan. We fall for it because we think it’s predictable that there would be one right from the first time they meet. Then it neatly subverts our expectations in the same subtle way it planted the idea in us. Romance is not the focus of the story; forgiveness and healing are.
But the outcome of the movie is fairly predictable; so is the whole story, really. It is a familiar story we’ve seen play out many times on screen and off screen, of teenage daughters clashing with their mothers, of mothers handing out love in the only way they know, yet unwittingly wounding their children in the process, and of those children growing up to become deeply wounded adults who resent their parents. This is the gospel of My Mother is a Witch.
What makes this film work mostly is the screenplay’s cleverness to employ restraint in its narrative, depending on visuals and the strong performances of Mercy Aigbe and Efe Irele to carry the weight of the story and they both don’t disappoint. When it veers toward melodrama, the story pauses to breathe. So, at the end, what we get is an honest reflection of the complexity of familial relationships, and how we can always find a way to mend what is broken, one step at a time, if we are willing to confront those we hurt and forgive those who hurt us.
My Mother is a Witch premiered on May 23 in cinemas.
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Side Musings
- That woman prepared starch and black soup for Imuetiyan within how many minutes of telling her children to go and arrange the kitchen for the cooking?
- What the hell is Imuetiyan typing away furiously on her phone, please? Anything but speak to her mother, I guess.
- Even if I was Imuetiyan’s mother that Gabriel came to marry my daughter with that sad-looking goat and his rascal-looking friends, I’d chase them with a cutlass, too.
- This is Mercy Aigbe at her finest!
- Was there some sort of Infinix phone advertisement going on in the scene where Imuetiyan purchased an Infinix phone or was it purely in the script that a fashion editor would only opt for an Infinix phone in place of an iPhone? Or even Samsung? It feels like a paid advert the way they (Ayo and Imuetiyan) were brandishing the phone.
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