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When Nkanga’s charming female lead, Pelumi (Treasure Obasi Johnson), asks Gbenga (Tomisin Ajayi) if he moved out of his home country because of his sister’s death, Gbenga nods in affirmation. He adds that the place has become a shithole that he can no longer stay in. There’s a quiet resemblance in his answer to a line from the Somali poet Warsan Shire’s poem titled Home: “No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark…home is the barrel of the gun.”
Gbenga’s sister dies by the barrel of a gun during a national protest against police brutality in their home country, Nigeria.
By the time the film starts, it’s been one year since that tragic incident; there’s a commemoration announcement on his radio but it is obvious Gbenga has carried this grief into his new country. His grief is self loathing, burdened by survivor guilt: it could have been him that day.
He walks through the world in an existential haze until he encounters Pelumi, who in that particular Nigerian sense of familiarity with fellow immigrants abroad, bonds over a meal of yam and egg, a staple in Nigerian homes.
The true strength of this film lies not in any grandiose or self-effacing attempt to wrestle with the weight of the protagonist’s grief, but rather in its quiet refusal to do so—finding instead a poignant resonance in the banality of everyday things like cooking yam and eggs and sharing casual banter with a stranger he meets in a hallway, a lesbian woman who unwittingly becomes both mirror and salve and then misery to the protagonist’s muted despair.
Pelumi is a closed book, and I don’t know how far the filmmaker carried the intentionality of this choice. We glimpse fragments of her identity—her sexuality, her profession, and the sharp-edged cynicism she shares with Gbenga about their country, a place they once called home. Here, in a foreign country, home is a place they both agree is safe. Yet, beyond the cryptic texts that haunt her phone, what do we truly grasp of her depths? What is her story?
Perhaps, it is what the film tries to tell us in its final moments, that her mystery is beside the point—it’s not her story to unfold. Instead, she lingers as a spectral anchor, present just enough to ground Gbenga’s journey, her enigma a quiet catalyst for his own reckoning with a new loss and betrayal.
I often love when a movie concludes on a hauntingly bleak note, leaving no room for optimism or resolution, and instead lingers with a sense of desolate hopelessness. But in the case of Nkanga’s Yam And Egg, the closing feels like a last-minute decision by the filmmaker to leave things unresolved, diluting the impact of its bleak conclusion.
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