The Set Up

Three women, one con, and a twist ledger kept with a bookkeeper's literalism: the desk's verdict is a polished, watchable thriller whose appetite for reversals outspends its budget for belief - and Inkblot's most obvious lesson in why structure is a character

The opening tells you it is a con story - a jailed ex-smuggler with a grudge is hired by a debt-cornered businessman to entrap a wealthy heiress into marriage - and Niyi Akinmolayan's film then executes the bait with real craft: the Lagos of film-one money is shot with a designer's eye, Adesua Etomi's heiress is allowed a mind before she's allowed a victim's role, and Kehinde Bankole's enforcer brings a physical seriousness the material needs to stay dangerous. For its first hour, the film runs the heist sub-genre's machinery - recruitment, rehearsal, close calls - tighter than most of its imports, and the desk logs that hour as genuinely very good Nollywood thriller work.

The craft is the company's house standard at its most visible: production design that reads as wealth rather than aspirational, an edit that keeps the cons legible (the hard part of any con film, and mostly passed), and a score that knows a reveal when it hears one. Dakore Akande's gambler-wife is the performance the room keeps stealing, and the cameos - Joke Silva and Tina Mba presiding over their own scenes - carry the film's self-awareness about class, which is its best theme: who in Lagos gets to be the one holding the plan.

The ledger's debits are what the mixed reviews filed under one word: twists. The third act re-litigates the plot once, then again, then a third time for the poster, and the reversals are individually directed well enough to land while collectively spending the audience's trust like a character with a stolen wallet - each reveal explaining scenes the film had just shown, which turns its own first two acts into foreshadowing with the safety pins showing. The emotional logic of the central trio gets mortgaged to the surprise mechanics; the climax's motive-reveal is delivered in the register of apology.

Weight: the shelf files it as the box-office-side data point of the FilmOne era - a well-made Lagos thriller that the public took to the multiplex and the critics split over in the exact places a writing room should study - plus the record that it is Akinmolayan's seventh feature and Inkblot's tenth, the studio-era moment when the industry's craft ceiling had risen enough that a flawed film looked this professional. Judged as a thriller: stylish and watchable, undone by its own arithmetic; judged as a lesson: the desk's standing example that in a con film, the twist you cannot afford is the one that cheats the characters.

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.

Catalogue card — trailer, cast and credits

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