Sundance: Some film endings comfort. Others provoke and leave us uneasy. Some quietly ask us to act. In these moments, the final frame becomes the film’s last word, the image that follows us out of the cinema.
The final scene and frame of Lady say a lot. They offer the clearest hints as to what the film’s 90 minutes build toward. Yet while the film eventually tows itself toward this moment of resistance and transformation in its eponymous lead, much of my uncertainty with the bold film remains in the ‘how’ of its journey. It attempts to speak about the individual, the immediacy of society, and the larger nation all at once, but this ambition often muddies its intent despite its moments of genuine filmmaking flair.
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Lady (her real name withheld throughout), played by the overactive Jessica Gabriel’s Ujah, finds herself navigating the male-dominated taxi world of Lagos. It takes someone with her kind of guts to survive there. Women behind the wheel are uncommon, and that rarity comes with stigma, and misogynistic jibes from her male peers.
Like her car amid the sea of Lagos’s yellow cabs, Lady stands out. She is frequently dressed in baggy trousers, tight T-shirts, and flowing shirts, her dreadlocks under a face cap. From a distance, you might almost mistake her for a man behind the wheel. She carries the stern look of a Lagos hustler, someone who trusts no one. It is the disposition of a person who has been abandoned before and now guards both her body and her heart.
Her selfless nature willingly shoulders responsibility for those she loves, even when it weighs heavily on her after short days with no passengers and long days stuck in fuel queues. But that selflessness ends at the personal level; it does not extend to the country.
Her childhood best friend, Pinky (played by the dazzling Amanda Oruh, who could have used more), drifts back into Lady’s life after five years. Pinky’s return to the slums comes with a proposition: Lady is to become the night driver for her and her fellow sex workers, ferrying them through their nightly and often dangerous escapades.
The pay is attractive enough to override Lady’s initial hesitation. It is good money, meant to fuel her dream of relocating to Freetown. Besides, little fazes her. She is as tough as they come, carrying that hardness into a night life world that soon forces her to confront her trauma.
All this unfolds against a Nigeria in economic free fall, with protests simmering in the background. Lady remains firmly for herself. She has an exit plan, and the “revolution” (constantly bellowed out by Seun Kuti, voicing a radio OAP) is not among her immediate concerns. Confident she can make it out, Lady treats the work as a quick hustle. But what begins as expedience slowly draws her into danger and an emotional reckoning.
In Olive Nwosu’s feature debut, sex work functions less as a subject than as a mirror into the life of a Nigerian woman who is not herself a sex worker, but whose life has been shaped by two people close to her who are. Left behind by both relationships, the film asks how this affects her from childhood into adulthood, in ways that are both subtle and life-altering. Rather than focusing on the sex trade itself, Lady centres this single individual, tracing how her identity and choices are formed by the paths taken by those around her.
More importantly, Lady tentatively explores how the past exerts power over the present of an individual. This plays out within an active, restless Lagos—its busy traffic scenes shot with a fresh sense of life—where this independent young cab driver navigates an otherwise lonesome existence.
Sex work here is treated as one among many issues that a conservative society like Nigeria publicly frowns upon. But the film gestures toward a more uncomfortable question: are we examining the system that pushes people toward it, not out of simple choice, but out of economic desperation? As we follow Lady, sex work and her trauma around it function as a proxy, a sample inner wound produced by a system one can either choose to fight, or flee. In the film, Lady (with her generic name and likely deliberate abstraction) is a representative of our collective experience.
Lady’s traumatic past will come to collide with her present in a bloody climax that presents a sudden transformation path. Through this, the film also examines the impact of sex work on the children of sex workers who may have been pulled into adult realities they could not possibly understand at the time.
What changes when a world only half-glimpsed in childhood, and already scarring, returns in adulthood at a different scale and with a new logic? As a child, Lady encounters sex as an aggressive performance unfolding in a shack. As an adult, it reappears more organised and controlled, overseen by a club owner–pimp (played briefly by Bucci Franklin, whose menacing presence is first heard before slowly filling up our screen). How does this shift reshape Lady’s perception of bartered intimacy?
Lady is gradually forced into proximity with these women, and eventually into a bond. As she comes to know them, it becomes clear that each of them has turned to sex work largely because of economic pressure. For the viewer, this continuity signals that the problems of the past still persist, from Lady’s unappealing childhood into her independent and still unappealing adulthood. Getting to know them, she gets a closer understanding of their hustle and dreams (not limited by geography or by the size of their current purses).
Unfolding in a city shaped by harsh economic conditions and fuel scarcity, the film clearly wants to situate Lady’s personal story within these larger national failures. While this ambition is noble, the narrative often gets shaky in the attempt to steady both.
The film is intercut with real-life protest footage, as well as inserts of a subject explaining her reasons for entering sex work. These moments gesture toward urgency, but they also strain the fiction’s internal coherence. The script, also penned by the Nigerian-born, Nigerian-British filmmaker, needed more work to weave richer layers into a thicker fabric of experience for both the eponymous lead and the viewers. When subsidy removal and forced land evictions enter the frame, the film appears to reach for timeliness, but the weighty topics feel loosely pegged on.
The film’s recurring political awareness calls to mind My Father’s Shadow, another UK–Nigeria production and part of a new wave of filmmakers capturing Lagos in fresh ways (right down to Lady’s evocative poster). Through radio announcements, protest footage, and scenes steeped in national frustration, political consciousness simmers in the background, quietly spurring decisions within the characters’ lives. Yet one begins to wonder how much of this awareness could function as more substance that feels fully materialised.
Still, this political attentiveness feels crucial to this wave of travelling Nigerian films (if a shameless country can even be shamed). Lady attempts to map personal trauma onto this larger political failure. The country produces the conditions, and the individual absorbs the damage. But in a difficult-to-track story of intergenerational trauma, the film looks like it is stretching itself.
Lady’s dream is to move to Freetown, a city that holds a sense of freshness for her, tied loosely to its history within the transatlantic slave trade. The film has a brief, lecture-like explanation of her choice—delivered through clunky dialogue—that undercuts the emotional pull of the dream even as it tries to justify it.
Fueling that dream is Lady’s time behind the wheel, transporting these women through the city. Within the four wheels of her red CR-V, the night driving scenes take on an almost fantastical lighting, transforming the car into a space of intimacy and possibility. These moments allow for bonding, arguments, banter, and joy among the found sisters. These are moments where they exercise a rare sense of control over their own lives. Just movement across the city, conversations, and a woman at the wheel. There is a quiet, golden trust that exists inside that vehicle, even when harmony gives way to tension. In these night time journeys, the car becomes a third space, outside male authority, where these women briefly glow in the texture of the lives they imagine for themselves.
Despite the chemistry of the larger group dynamic, the film fails to deeply explore the shared history between the two childhood friends and what it truly means to grow up in the same place (under similar conditions) only to diverge so completely. As a result, certain emotional outbursts feel far-fetched. The anger and tantrums between them are not fully grounded; we are neither given enough insight into where these feelings stem from nor convincingly shown how the relationship reaches certain boiling points. These narrative decisions often feel overly restrained. While restraint worked to stronger effect in Nwosu’s short Egungun, in this feature-length context it registers as underdeveloped.
The film never loses sight of the fact that it is less concerned with the women as a collective (who remain underwritten) nor with the men the sex workers spend their nights with. Instead, Lady is centred firmly on its protagonist rather than being driven by the lives or events of the women around her.
This focus becomes clearest the first time Lady witnesses the reality of their night work. The film does not shy away from the explicit nature of the nightlife, and in doing so opens up one of its more effective sequences. Her present-day shock is interspersed with fragments of memory, pulling us deeper into her psyche. Lady is burdened by a weight she herself cannot fully name. Visually, the film does something compelling here with holes, doors, and frames that become portals into memory, spaces Lady peeks through as she inches closer to confronting her past.
Jessica Gabriel’s Ujah’s performance as Lady often feels too eager, particularly in the way she pushes the character’s masculine edge. Yet she finds firmer control in silence, hitting emotional beats more convincingly when the film allows her to hold back. This restraint is especially effective in moments of physical presence, such as her posture when she confidently takes a seat at a table of men, even when only asked to come closer, speaking more clearly than her louder choices.
Gabriel’s Ujah and Oruh, along with a largely fresh cast including Tinuade Jemiseye, Eva Ibiam, Precious Agu Eke, Fadesaye Olateru-Olagbegi, and Agu Chineye Esthyraph, largely hold their own across the film’s runtime. Still, my lingering issue with Nigerian pidgin on screen persists. In most of our films, it remains awkwardly performed. It comes off as an unsettling call-and-response that can throw even a natural speaker off, as seen in heated scenes between Lady and Pinky.
That said, I remain convinced that one of these travelling films on the festival circuit will eventually produce Nigeria’s first true global star. There is a believability that unrecycled faces bring to their performances. They arrive free from the weight of preconceived character types, allowing the film to shape them in real time. This freshness lends Lady much of its vitality. But the under-exploration persists. Lady’s relationship with the women around her is a canvas with far more potential than the film fully explores. A glimpse of this promise appears in the scene set in the sex workers’ room, where the camaraderie of the group briefly comes alive. As an ensemble—buoyed by the cast’s freshness—they shine as women you want to know better, each drawn into this world by the shared logic of economic survival and japa.
There are many directions a film set within the world of prostitution can take. Sex workers have long been a mainstay of global cinema, appearing across lighthearted works to gritty thrillers, though in older Nollywood films they have often been poorly represented. When approached thoughtfully, it allows films to speak about far more than sex itself. In Lady, it becomes a site of our lead’s perception of intimacy, performance, and survival.
Here, the film channels its protest impulse through a traumatised woman driving a cab—already deemed improper for her gender—whose encounters with sex workers, rendered even more socially unacceptable, unfold against fuel scarcity, street protests, and a city under political strain. It is a bold framework that reaches for urgency, but there remains a sense of unrealised potential with its daring premise.
That unrealised potential matters because Lady is not merely concerned with individual failure or personal trauma. Even in its thinnest characterisations (Oruh’s all-important Pinky), the film insists on something broader, that everyone within its frame is caught inside a broken system that has been in place since our childhoods.
All the characters are victims of that system. To escape it, many cling to the persistent dream of a better future elsewhere, hence the japa wave. On the other path, at home, lies relentless pressure, always threatening to combust. Then, the protest phrase “enough is enough” speaks not to a single grievance, but to a multitude of wounds, such as the perennial issues we have endured, the people who have left us along the way, and the countless stains a failing nation leaves on all of our identities.
Lady is produced by Film4, Level Forward and Ossian International. World sale is handled by HanWay Films. Lady had its world premiere at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.
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Side Musings
- Not sure why her own car colour is different in Lagos. Did Lady buy the vehicle from an Ibadan-based Cabbie, maybe?
- Did Pinky really enter that car without any money of hers? SMH!
- Religion as a symbolism in the background of these films: We get a shot of a pastor preaching roadside and a large banner for a religious event. Check! Check!! Is a trope developing here?
- Is Lady’s dream in Freetown music? Or she is just channeling her inner Issa.
- No surprises with that Toyin Oshinaike appearance. Always expected at this point.
- I just have to shout out Ifeoma Chukwuogo‘s Bariga Sugar for its depiction of sex work. A short film everyone should see.
- That Little Simz needle drop!
- Lady screens at Berlinale next.
