We know the story of A Night in 2005, we have seen it before, in many iterations, but the technical competence of Temidayo Makanjuola’s taut revenge and social thriller is what happens when a serious subject receives a serious treatment. It is credit to her coherent screenplay and Chinedum Iregbu’s efficient editing that the film can use tropes and still feel refreshing, and that it deserves a better, larger title and perhaps should have simply been called A Night.
Not that most of it happens at nights, but some key scenes do. On the titular night in 2005, a teenage Ife attends a party in an upscale Lagos neighbourhood, and her best friend Ari’s boyfriend Ope rapes her. For years, the adult Ife (Ini Dinma Okojie at her best) carries the pain in silence, until she sees on the news that her attacker Ope (Efa Iwara), the son of the powerful Dada family, is close to becoming governor. Oblivious of the coming doom, Ari (Teniola Aladese) causally tells her on an unrelated issue: “Abeg, when you’ve lived here as long as I have, you’d know that shouting is the only way a woman gets what she wants.” It is smart foreshadowing, though, even before it, Ife already has her impetus. Confronted with her own silence, she risks fraying her most important relationships: with her fiancé, with her best friend, and with her mother.
The risks for each of those relationships are woven partly around the elite social scene and hierarchy of Lagos, which the film captures. Ife’s fiancé Paul (Taye Arimoro), a fan of Ope the gubernatorial candidate, offers him his card, and Ope ignores him. Like the typical Nigerian in chase of association to power, Paul smiles and takes it in stride. Ife’s mother Yetide (Bimbola Akintola, overacting), too, seeks association with Ope’s mother Anjola Dada (an impervious Ireti Doyle), who keeps dismissing her, but no desperate social climber is easily dismissed.
(Although Yetide’s initiating of that important conversation about Ife’s father in the backyard, of all places and randomly, could be read as a logical character flaw given her parenting skills, it really is illogical information dumping — one of the few avoidable mishaps in the script, another being when Anjola Dada says “phantom” while the closed captioning read “fathom.”)
It is at Ari’s book launch, however, that the keg heats up, and what happens there is orchestrated beautifully and with powerful effect. Cinematographer Barnabas Emordi is in top form: first we see the stares of guests; we don’t hear it the first time but we can tell from those stares that something dumbfounding has happened. Okojie and Doris Uzoamaka Aniunoh, as Ope’s wife Kelechi, shine bright here — the two best young actresses in Nollywood right now. The next beat is brilliant writing: at sea, Ife going online; and the one after that grounds all that freeing action in reality: Ife confronted by her people for her selfishness.
But it is in what happens before Ari’s event that A Night in 2005 earns its plaudits. With tension building, the screenplay gives Ife a break by letting her go to visit her uncle to negotiate their family land in the village. That sub-plot is a well-timed respite from the suffocation of urban Lagos, and those supporting characters — her farmer uncle Baba (Kayode Olaiya) and her niece Funmi (Modesinuola Ogundiwin) — are given their own reality. A beautiful romance is blooming between Funmi and a young man in the village, and those little joys, as well as the family revelation, serve as a breather for Ife, so that when she sets off for Lagos, she is emotionally backed up for a fight.
Most similarly themed films shrink into wishful didacticism, but A Night in 2005 is calibrated to today’s gender and social media climate without ceding artistic integrity to it. “All this foolish wokeness!” Ope rages towards the end. “You females fail to realize what’s going on here? Do you know who I am? What do you think is gonna happen now? Nothing!”
This is what largely happens when a young woman exposes a powerful man, but its polemic is not as obvious as one might think: its polemic is that all those things happen only because there are powerful women behind those men — until other women assume power and force accountability. In 2025 Nigeria, it rings too true, even when the accuser is a powerful woman. ♦
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