Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?
This has long been perhaps one of the stupidest yet paradoxical questions of extremely infinitesimal importance. One might bring this up at a moment of weakness, say after the third glass of wine or when we’ve been beaten in a debate. Yet, the wunderkind director, Kunle Afolayan has been asking this question for decades with his film.
The premise of his latest Recall is not dissimilar to many of Afolayan’s works—The Figurine, Irapada, Aníkúlápó—which seek to question the reality of African spirituality.
In Recall, Anita (Sharon Ooja) and Goke (Olarotimi Fakunle) have been married for 10 years. A day after their anniversary, Anita wakes up and has lost all her memories of the last 10 years, including her marriage and her two children. It turns out Anita had only come to fall in love with Goke through juju. But the juju has to be renewed every 10 years for her to stay in love with him. As the film progresses, we realise that Goke is ill-fated by the Gods and could never have found a woman to love him.
To drive home Goke’s status as a kind of untouchable, he has bucked teeth. “I didn’t want a pretty face,” Afolayan said of casting Olarotimi in that role. “We even had to tone him down for him to look not as appealing.”
With this film, Afolayan presents a brash enquiry into the human condition. Are the Gods really the masters of our faith? Does destiny exist? Or are we just all faking it? Is it possible that Goke didn’t find love because he had terrible game, and as Afolayan intended, he was not an appealing man?
What does Afolayan think?
“Look, the world is full of forces beyond the ordinary eyes,” he told Zikoko at the film’s premiere at the 2024 Africa International Film Festival (AFRIFF). “But for my part, I’m not religious. I’m spiritual. I don’t do religion. I don’t do any religion. But I have nothing against any religion. I don’t go to church. But if they’re doing it where I am, I don’t mind participating. I’m a freethinker. But I believe there is God.”
With this, the point of the film becomes clearer. Beyond all Goke’s pleas for the woman he loves, all Olarotimi’s crying as him, and the romance between them (for those naive enough to think this director is into that type of thing), Afolayan makes a strong case for how, regardless of what destiny says, for those who believe in that type of thing, we can always pick ourselves up if we work a bit harder at it.
Seeing his family crumble before his eyes and his once loving in-laws, played by Keppy Ekpenyong and Tina Mba, become cold to him, Goke picks up his lover boy hat and fights to have his family back. He becomes a more thoughtful partner and an even more thorough gifter.
The film is as much about African spirituality as it is a sharp commentary on the state of modern Pentecostalism and how Afolayan sees it. Patience Ozokwor makes a cameo in Recall as a powerful prophetess based in Badagry, who has her followers WhatsApp pictures of their loved ones to be prayed on. She is the one that Anita’s mother runs to when the memory loss gets worse and brings the marriage to its untimely end.
If she’s fake or not, Afolayan won’t say. We don’t see how she finds out that Anita has been bewitched. But that is the point. Afolayan does not mind tethering with the powers that be. He acknowledges that there are spiritual forces at play. In the film, he suggests that there might be something amiss in modern-day Nigerian Pentecostalism, and for that reason, perhaps we should be cautious when approaching it because it is a religion before anything else.
At the close of the film, an immense tragedy is about to set in, so the family converges before an Ifa priest in the hope of respite. The Ifa priest is kinder than Ozokwor’s prophetess, who destroys a relationship that would have otherwise made a killing from online shippers. Unlike her, he lays down the repercussions of his solution to the family. They decide if it’s in their best interest. They have a choice, and as he carries out his rituals, this time, Afolayan takes us along. The family is not pleased with the result, so they ask him for more guidance and help. He reminded them they knew the terms even before he started the ritual. They were given a choice.
When I asked Afolayan what he hoped people would take out of Recall, he also wants the audience to have a choice. “I don’t know. They should take whatever they want to take. I’ve done it,” he said.
