The CEO

Lagos luxury as genre: the most commercial Afolayan is also the most contested - production design looking for a spine

Six women at the top of a city, one fashion house as the hinge, and a camera budget that never once admits it is Nigerian cinema trying: The CEO is what the industry's theatrical era commissioned when a director with the figurine-and-swap pedigree decided glamour itself was a subject worth the price of the frame. It is a film about competence under scrutiny, dressed so beautifully that the argument about whether it has a script almost misses the point - almost.

The craft is the thesis. The lighting design treats Victoria Island at night like a set built for desire rather than a location endured, the wardrobe department is doing actual character work, and the ensemble is directed to talk over each other the way boardrooms do - the desk files this among the first Nigerian films where the rich scenes feel observed rather than aspirational. Where the machinery strains is in the connective tissue: four or five mini-arcs competing for two hours means grief arrives by memo in places where the film should have sat down and let it happen.

Held honestly to account: the brand weight is real - this is a film that flirts with being a long advertisement for a lifestyle, and one subplot in particular resolves on a handshake and a sunset where the writing owed an accounting. The desk also refuses to pretend the third act's sudden legal-thread convenience is anything but a shortcut. And yet the ambition is its own evidence: a Nigerian film that could only exist because its director's last two had proven cinemas would pay for polish, and the polish is here even when the plot is not.

Weight, on this shelf's ledger, is measured in what a film makes possible rather than what it achieves, and The CEO's entry is double-edged: it proved the luxury multi-hander could be financed and exported to streaming shelves worldwide, and it also showed exactly how far an ensemble can be designed before it is dramatised. The desk's number is generous to the first fact and stern to the second; the streaming afterlife belongs to the first. Watch it as the industry's costume fitting for the premium era - and grade it, kindly, on whether the play arrived after.

The axes

Reviewed by The BRYME Entertainment desk on 2026-09-25. Scores follow the published method; they are never sold and never previewed to rights-holders. Disagree? The corrections door is open.

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