The most successful move Kemi Adetiba ever made was also the most constraining one. King of Boys — the 2018 film that announced her as Nollywood’s most technically sophisticated crime filmmaker, that sent Sola Sobowale into the conversation of all-time performances, that generated a sequel in 2021 and a cultural discourse that has not fully closed — established a specific expectation. It told the audience, the industry, and every future financier what a Kemi Adetiba production looks like: Lagos noir, operatic, meticulous, large in every register. The world of her films is one where corruption has grandeur and ambition has a specific visual grammar.
To Kill A Monkey — her eight-episode Netflix series that premiered in July 2025 — is her deliberate decision to leave that world behind. “TKAM is unlike anything I’ve ever done,” she said in a statement to her audience following the series’ release, which RollCallAfrica has reviewed in full. “It was a crazy risk to take, but it was a story I strongly felt I needed to tell — no gloss, no theatrics, no grandiose characters to hide behind. Just a raw, human story.”
Those words — “no gloss, no theatrics, no grandiose characters to hide behind” — are not casual. They are a filmmaker naming, precisely, the elements that made her reputation. And then describing what she chose to do without them.
What the Film Is and What It Asks
The series follows Efemini — played by William Benson in a performance the critical community is still arguing about — a man of exceptional education, personal integrity, and long-standing poverty, whose chance reunion with an old friend pulls him into the underworld of cybercrime. The moral engine of the series is the question Adetiba placed at its centre: how much does it take to break a principled person? When does desperation transform the ethical into the criminal? When does survival supersede virtue?
“Everyone thinks they know what they’d do when faced with a moral crossroad,” she said. “But that answer often comes from a place of comfort and privilege.” The sentence does not need expansion. The series is eight episodes built around proving it.
The critical reception divided along predictable lines. The audience who came to the series expecting King of Boys territory — the world-building, the stylised production design, the characters who exist at the apex of their corruption — found something smaller and in some registers less immediately satisfying. The Afrocritik review described it as “enthralling” in its first half and strained in its resolution. What Kept Me Up called it “a pale imitation of what once made Kemi Adetiba exciting.” These are the reviews of critics who were measuring the series against the standard she herself set, which is the legitimate standard to apply to a filmmaker of her stature.
The audience took a different measurement. Adetiba’s statement after the series’ reception was not a deflection of the critical debate. It was a separate acknowledgement, directed at the people who responded to what she was actually trying to do. “You all turned TKAM into a monster hit!! You validated this story. You validated me. And I will never forget this feeling.”
What the AMVCA Nominations Confirm
Eight nominations at the 12th AMVCA, including Best Movie and Best Director, place To Kill A Monkey in the same conversation as The Herd, My Father’s Shadow, and Gingerrr. This is the jury saying that whatever the debates about the series’ resolution and its formal relationship to Adetiba’s previous work, the achievement of TKAM — what it attempted, what it risked, what it delivered in its best moments — is in the first rank of African screen work in 2025-2026.
The nomination for Best Director is the one that carries the most freight. Adetiba is competing in that category against Akinola Davies Jr. (whose My Father’s Shadow is in the Cannes official selection), Daniel Etim Effiong (whose debut feature reached 30 million Netflix views), and Tunde Kelani (whose career has defined the formal possibilities of Yoruba cinema for thirty years). Being in that company requires a specific kind of directorial achievement. The jury identified it in TKAM regardless of what the critics found wanting.
What the Risk Actually Was
This publication wants to be specific about what was at stake in Adetiba’s decision that most analyses have not examined directly. To Kill A Monkey is the first release from a three-title Netflix deal — a deal that includes Welcome To The Fourth and the third instalment of the King of Boys franchise. The Netflix relationship is one of the most valuable institutional assets any Nollywood filmmaker currently holds. The first title from that deal was not a King of Boys extension — the commercially safest choice, the franchise the audience was waiting for. It was a series about an ordinary man in impossible circumstances, with no operatic villain, no power structure to fascinate the eye, and no character as immediately magnetic as Alhaja Eniola Salami.
That is not a creative whim. That is a statement about what she believes filmmaking is for. “No gloss, no theatrics, no grandiose characters to hide behind.” What you hide behind is what you reach for when you are uncertain. Adetiba chose not to hide. Eight AMVCA nominations say the choice landed somewhere real.
To Kill A Monkey (2025) · Created, written and directed by Kemi Adetiba · Netflix (8 episodes) · Stars: William Benson, Bucci Franklin, Bimbo Akintola, Stella Damasus, Chidi Mokeme · Produced by Kemi Adetiba Visuals and Remi Adetiba
— Adaeze Okoye. RollCallAfrica, May 2026. Sources: Kemi Adetiba social media statement (July 2025, reported by PM News and The Nation), What Kept Me Up review (July 2025), ShockNG, AMVCA 2026 nominations.
