There’s a lot of communication via body language in this film, and for the most part, it’s the actors, under Wingonia Ikpi’s direction, who give The Lost Days its heart and emotional heft.

By Vivian Nneka Nwajiaku

The first half of Wingonia Ikpi’s slow burn debut feature, The Lost Days (2025), is solid. That it features an older couple in what looks like a second chance romance trope already sells it to anyone who likes a good romance. That it takes place predominantly in a small town that looks alive sets it apart from most of mainstream Nollywood. And with familial frictions and tensions of the past as its conflict, it sounds like a perfect recipe for an interesting drama.

The Lost Days is about a wealthy woman on a journey of recovery and reconnection. Chisom Agu, a business magnate and widow, has just been informed that she’s in remission after an arduous battle with Hodgkin lymphoma. As people are wont to do when they face death and make it out alive, Chisom takes her second chance seriously, eager to confront her past regrets.

Confronting her past means going home, so she embarks on a trip. Her daughter assumes she means their hometown in Nsukka. And though Chisom allows her daughter to hold that impression, she leaves Lagos for a different kind of home, one that’s situated in Siun village, Ogun State, where she hopes to reconnect with the man she loved in her youth and the son she left behind.

In an immaculate debut screen performance, seasoned theatre professional, Ifeoma Fafunnwa stars in the lead as Chisom. Bimbo Manuel plays her past lover, Kolawole, aka Baba Kola, a widowed father of two men. Baba Kola comes onscreen without fanfare, a curious introduction for a character who is a physical manifestation of Chisom’s past and regrets. But it’s easy to forgive once interaction, laden with awkwardness and tension, between Chisom and Kola kicks off.

Fafunnwa carries a natural warm presence, but she’s also a skilled performer, deeply emotive but very controlled. And Manuel remains that veteran actor you can rely on to be modest in his deliveries but always effective. When they interact, the appeal is not so much what they say but how they say it. There’s a lot of communication via body language in this film, and it works so well in saying what’s left unsaid, in hinting at secrets harboured, regrets suppressed, and grief masked.

Ikpi has a good eye for directing, aided by her background in production, and it’s evident in how she uses everything onscreen to tell the film’s story and establish its characters, from the choice of locations to the production design, to the casting choices, and even down to the colour of clothing on the characters’ backs. But for the most part, it’s the actors, under Ikpi’s direction, who give The Lost Days its heart and emotional heft.

Fafunwa’s Chisom is at the centre of this film, and Manuel’s Baba Kola is at the very least the male lead, but the cast of The Lost Days feels like an ensemble. Chisom’s daughter, Nkem (played by Cynthia Clarke, gorgeous and well-suited to the role, but considerably lacking in acting range), is certainly a supporting character through and through, but Baba Kola’s sons, Moses (Baaj Adebule) and Kola (Durotimi Okutagidi), take up plenty of space in the story, with strong enough performances to match.

Baba Kola’s sons know some parts of their father’s secret past, at least as much as their late mother shared with them. So, of course, they have notes on the re-emergence of this woman he calls his old friend. But where one son is receptive, the other is not. Kola, the younger son and apparent black sheep who doesn’t mind that his father has his sights set on a woman for the first time in the decade since their mum’s passing, very much minds that the new woman is the woman his father would have preferred to marry over their mother.

As a result, the dynamics between each son and Chisom, and by extension Baba Kola, are far apart, with one end offering reprieve to balance out the agitation on the other end. But both parallels have an allure to them that could have provided valuable support for the film’s main plot, especially in light of the very early revelation that she birthed one of those sons, if Abdul Tijani-Ahmed’s screenplay had just let the story tell itself.

Okutagidi is an undeniable talent, embodying the entirety of Kola, arguably the most complex of the characters: his anger, his hurt, his grief, his love, and even his little joys. And Adebule holds his own, doing his very best to sell an underdeveloped and perplexing character, despite the excesses in his performance in the film’s second half.

Which brings me to the film’s second half, and I mean half both literally and conceptually. Midway into The Lost Days, the plot takes a detour into an unwarranted crime subplot and becomes a thriller of sorts, anchored by a kidnapping incident that plunges both the film and its characters into utter confusion. 

While the subplot manages to maintain the pace of the first half, at least as much as it can as a thriller, it derails the main plot, distracts from the heart of the film, and fundamentally undermines the emotional base that the first half laboured to establish. Not only is it a subplot that stunts the development of the primary plot, it’s not even mildly developed or logical. Characters’ actions are beyond far-fetched, motivations are thoroughly unconvincing, and the dialogue is just flimsy, all to serve a plot twist that isn’t shocking enough to have shock value.

And so, what could have been an easy ninety-minute watch that makes a soft statement about family, love and life ends up being a two-hour watch that says too little, despite its preachiness. The Lost Days does signal a promising future for Wingonia Ikpi in the director’s chair. Hopefully, that future comes with better material to work with.

Rating: 3/5

*The Lost Days is streaming on Prime Video.

Vivian Nneka Nwajiaku is a writer, film critic, TV lover, and occasional storyteller writing from Lagos. She has a master’s degree in law but spends most of her time watching, reading about and discussing films and TV shows. She’s particularly concerned about what art has to say about society’s relationship with women. Connect with her on X @Nneka_Viv

The post “The Lost Days” Review: Wingonia Ikpi’s First Feature Starts Strong but Crashes Halfway into the Journey first appeared on Afrocritik.