A bond that has existed across time and media, strengthened by adversity and a world that is often against their existence, is female friendship. This forms the core of What No One Knows. The dynamic of female friendships forges new citadels of safety and peace for the women to come back to after existing in a hostile world. Cinema has always tried to capture this forging. With this film, it captures both the forging and the breaking.
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What No One Knows takes us through the story of two women who have been best friends since childhood and have their friendship tested by a shared secret. It takes you on a journey from childhood to adulthood through trials, joys and celebrations that their sisterhood brings and how the events of their youth come to define their eventual fracture.
Written and directed by Tope Laguda, the film never finds sure footing in the friendship that works as its foundation in both story and acting. The first part chronicling their childhood is bogged down by stiff acting performances. Layo Laguda as young Oriyomi is singular in every scene, her voice and actions are in constant monotony and reactions are often delayed or nonexistent. Kelly Orogun as young Ife is stiff in a totally different way, all her reactions seem overly rehearsed and independent of the rest of the scene. The rest of the cast does enough but Tina Mba (Breaded Life) stands out as if she is in a different, and better, film. As the girls grow, they are replaced by Tope Laguda and Adunni Ade (Soole) who are satisfactory in the way lukewarm water is, never memorable but sufficient for the film.
The story is mostly solid in the first part even though sometimes too clinical. The building blocks for the future conflict are laid and the friendship is given a past that you can invest in but once the story moves to adulthood, there is a detrimental shift. The women lose dimension and the men suck life out of the film with an inflated importance and subpar acting. Mofe Duncan (Ile Owo) and Enyinna Nwigwe (Living in Bondage: Breaking Free) are mechanical and never rise to the required performance needed for key reveals in the second half of the film. There is a scene at the hospital when Oriyomi`s son is brought in that requires a meld of anger, fear, disappointment and betrayal; we get none of that, instead Mofe Duncan awkwardly stumbles through it.
What No One Knows leans into the inherent melodrama of its story— but does so with little success, despite the defining incident being one that could generate a strong emotional appeal if narrated to someone. It fails to capture your emotions because it is often flat on so many fronts. It tries to comment on something interesting about how marriages twist female friendships into unrecognizable turns and how the female friendship is often a marriage in itself, but it never sits with that commentary; it almost feels accidental even.
There is a tactful way to preserve the lifelong friendship and still tackle the dynamics with the men they marry, but in this film, the men almost suck life from its core. The shift is more involved with their individual marriages and less concerned with what brought us into the film in the first place. We get separate scenes where Oriyomi and Ife interact with their love interests, but rarely see how these interactions are contorting their friendship till the inciting incident of the film happens.
The direction follows the acting where it leaves a lot to be desired, you do not come out of the film holding on to any memorable shot and its incoherent visual tone dulls whatever interesting edges the film grows. The film trudges to a baffling conclusion that never truly tackles the fallout of the film’s conflict. It takes a jarring positive, nuclear family-oriented tone in its closing and basically forgets about one of the women in the defining friendship. It starts to feel like accidental meta commentary on the ways women’s stories are battered and flattened into forgetting and we end up not knowing anything about the conclusion of a core half of the story.
What No One Knows is available for rent on Prime Video (in some regions) and Fawesome TV (for free with ads).
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Side Musings
- The choice to slap on a washed filter for their scenes when they were young was confusing and kinda funny.
- Oriyomi never caught a break when she was young. Imagine your grandma, your sole guardian, dying on the day of your graduation.
- Ife’s husband switching out her birth control had way less consequences than I hoped for.
