When RollCallAfrica marked Mildred Okwo’s return earlier this year, we set the expectation her body of work invites: precision, craft, a refusal of lazy choices, and performances drawn out to a standard most Nigerian films do not reach. On Different Grounds — her first feature since 2021’s La Femme Anjola — meets that expectation in its direction and its performances, and falls short of it in its screenplay. The result is a film that is a pleasure to watch in its parts and frustrating in its whole: veterans elevating material that does not fully deserve them.
The film is a romantic comedy, a register Okwo has worked in before with The Meeting, her beloved 2012 satire. Where The Meeting had a sharp comic engine — the specific absurdity of Nigerian bureaucracy — On Different Grounds works in the gentler, more conventional territory of romantic entanglement, and the conventionality is the problem. The plot moves through the beats the genre requires without the specific comic or emotional invention that lifted Okwo’s best work above the category.
What Works
The performances are the reason to see the film. Okwo has always been a director who draws precise, controlled work from her cast, and On Different Grounds is full of it. The veteran performers — the actors who have spent decades building the craft that Nollywood’s commercial machine does not always give them room to display — are given space here, and they use it. There is a pleasure in watching accomplished performers work at the top of their ability under a director who knows how to frame them, and the film delivers that pleasure consistently even when the story around the performances wavers.
Okwo’s directorial craft is visible throughout. The film is well-shot, well-paced in its individual scenes, and assembled with the technical care that distinguishes her work from the commercial mainstream’s rougher edges. Where lesser Nigerian romantic comedies feel assembled to a deadline, On Different Grounds feels made by someone who cares about how each scene looks and moves. That care is real and it is felt.
Where It Strains
The screenplay is the weak link, and in a romantic comedy, the screenplay is close to everything. The genre lives or dies on the specificity of its central relationship — on whether the audience believes in and roots for the couple, on whether the obstacles between them feel real rather than mechanical, on whether the comedy arises from character rather than contrivance. On Different Grounds assembles the components of a romantic comedy without quite igniting the chemistry that makes the form work. The relationship at its centre is pleasant but not compelling; the obstacles feel like plot structure rather than genuine tension; the comedy is mild where it should be sharp.
The frustration is specifically that Okwo’s craft deserves better material. A director this precise, working with performers this capable, should have a screenplay that gives the precision and the performances something to build. Instead the film’s technical accomplishment and its acting quality are deployed in service of a story that does not rise to meet them. It is uneven in the specific way that a good filmmaker’s lesser work is uneven — the quality is visible in every element except the one that matters most, the writing that would have tied the elements into something that lands.
On Different Grounds is worth seeing for the performances and for the pleasure of watching Mildred Okwo’s craft, even in a minor key. It is not the return-to-form that her five-year absence primed the audience to hope for. It is a reminder that even Nollywood’s most exacting filmmakers are only as strong as their screenplays, and that craft and performance, however excellent, cannot fully carry a story that never finds its own reason to exist. The wait was long. The film is good in its parts. The whole is less than Okwo at her best.
RCA Score: 6.8 — Watchable
On Different Grounds (2026) · Dir. Mildred Okwo · Nigeria · The Audrey Silva Company · Romantic Comedy.
— Adaeze Okoye. RollCallAfrica, Lagos. 3 August 2026. Sources: On Different Grounds theatrical release, The Audrey Silva Company, RollCallAfrica film coverage.
