In Akinola Davies Jr.’s semi-autobiographical film My Father’s Shadow, the beginning might be the end. Davies, who won the Short Film Grand Jury Prize at Sundance for Lizard (2021), continues his fascination with memory, grief, and the uncanny, creating a film that strangely feels like a dream coalescing into a nightmare. At some point, you begin to wonder if what you’re watching is real. The film decoys as a vignette of simple road life: two young brothers, Remi (Chibuike Marvellous Egbo) and Akin (Godwin Egbo), are granted the gift of a single day with their estranged father, Folarin (Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù), one that they spend journeying through the leviathan that is 1993 Lagos. The trip’s official purpose is urgent — Folarin is desperately trying to retrieve six months of unpaid wages. But for the boys, the journey is an adventure, a golden window of presence from an in-and-out daddy.

It is not very often that you encounter visually intelligent films in Nigerian cinema; hence, My Father’s Shadow is a remarkable rarity. Jermaine Edwards’ camerawork is nothing short of sublime. It is a patient, observational, reverent gaze that finds startling beauty and deep melancholy in the mundane. We are immediately immersed in the iconography of the time and place: the lumbering danfos (staples in almost every artistic delineation of Lagos) and the overwhelming volume of hustlers erecting a teeming human ant-hill where movement is perpetual but progress is agonisingly stalled. Typically, this is Lagos and everyone is busy but barely alive, merely surviving on the friction between working, praying, and enduring. This visual quantification of the city’s mood, further punctuated by many period-specific details, allows Davies to artfully sidestep the pitfalls of cinematic anachronism.

Beneath this vérité surface, however, something more sinister is brewing. My Father’s Shadow refuses to be a mere slice-of-life drama. Folarin suffers from sudden, debilitating nosebleeds. These episodes are accompanied by jarring, subliminal flashes of darkened, violent imagery. They are splinters of a trauma the film refuses to fully explain but whose presence is a tingling hum of dread that occasionally pulls us from the relative ease which the pace seduces us into. As the family unit winds through the city, soldiers with menacing, unsmiling faces are seen entering Bonny Camp, a location heavily hinted at — if not explicitly named — as the site of a massacre or military crackdown.

This all happens against the backdrop of the June 12, 1993 Nigerian election crisis, an explosive moment when the country was yanked violently from the promise of democracy. The air is thick with a fatalistic, almost unbearable optimism that Moshood Abiola’s presumed victory will finally sweep away the “vagabonds in power.” It’s very painful to watch the characters speak about this. If only they knew. We, the audience, are burdened with the dramatic irony of knowing the tragic outcome. We know this hope is a candle flame in a hurricane, and this knowledge imbues every scene with a profound sense of pathos. The tragedy is twofold: the certain knowledge that the election is already doomed, and the growing, painful suspicion that Folarin himself is walking toward a fate connected to this national calamity.

My Father’s Shadow is fundamentally a meditation on love, with almost every frame affirming this theme through the lens’ gentle caress of the tactile connection between father and sons. It is a testament to Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù’s formidable talent that one easily overlooks his not-so-perfect attempt at flattening the lilt of his British accent into a Nigerian tone and his scarcely passing Yoruba. The Gangs of London star more than compensates by channeling the complexity of Folarin’s psyche with a stirring, visceral conviction. Folarin is performing fatherhood against the clock. His love is sincere and omnipresent. He can protect his sons for a day, maybe, but not from the world that awaits them. Thus, he endeavours to instill a lifetime of values into them over the course of a few precious hours before it is too late. The film suggests that the best a father can do is try to leave a luminous shadow for his sons to follow.

The boys, played with naturalistic perfection by real-life brothers, are the film’s innocent heart. Through their wide, curious eyes, we experience the sensory overload of Lagos. For them, Lagos is mythic; a place of marvels, sure, but also of chaos and unexplained adult secrets. Their naivety cuts through the social artifice, exposing the absurdities of class and power. “It’s not nice to stare at the people that are suffering,” Folarin gently chides, prompting Akin’s retort, “Then why is he in the middle of the road?” The film uses the boys’ clear, unvarnished logic to highlight the convoluted, corrupted moral landscape their father, and by extension, Nigeria and its people, must traverse. By the time the day ends and the political turmoil breaches the bubble of their journey, we are left with a very haunting sense of loss.

My Father’s Shadow is a tense, almost surreal film that is devastatingly articulate. It trusts us to watch and to feel. Akinola Davies has made a work of lasting art. Its slow-burn pacing and subtle storytelling may initially seem dragging, but they serve to immerse viewers in the world Davies has carefully created — and it is a very brilliant one.