I came to Cannes with a list of movies I knew I had to see and I was particularly interested in Clarissa because I had read that it was directed by Nigerian twin brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri.
Clarissa follows a Nigerian woman preparing for a party. As everything that could possibly go wrong seems to unfold around her, she reflects on the days of her youth and the choices that led her to where she is now.
An audience member praised the twins for showing “the beauty through the cracks,” and I thought that was a perfect way to describe the visual language the Esiris created.
Narratively, every character wears a mask of who they believe they should be. Through the cracks—in their eyes, their smiles, and their silences—we glimpse the unhappiness underneath. Those fractures eventually reveal the film’s central concern: the quiet ways people settle, not only in love but in the versions of themselves they allow to exist. The Esiris replicate that same idea visually.
Images of Nigeria materialized on the screen, many of them achromatic, which surprised me because so many images I’ve seen of Lagos are bursting with color. But there was a pattern to the pallid visuals: within the muted landscapes and people were brief glimpses of vibrancy. As the story progressed, the color palette gradually came alive, revealing rich and textured depictions of Nigeria.
The shots that have been circulating on social media are undoubtedly beautiful—the wide frames of the young friends sitting in the grass or the image of adult Clarissa standing by her window. But the visuals that stayed with me were the nighttime party scenes: the dance floor overflowing with colorful outfits, bodies moving in rhythm, and lantern light illuminating the backyard.
Through flashbacks, we are introduced to young Clarissa, played by India Amarteifio, an affluent teenager vacationing in rural Nigeria with her friend Ugo, her new friend Sandra, Richard, and her then love interest Peter. The group spends their days dining in gardens and sunbathing by the lakeside, but beneath the idyllic setting, tensions of various degrees simmer between them. When compared to their adult selves, some of them become almost unrecognizable.
Alongside Clarissa’s story, the film follows a soldier named Septimus and his wife, Hadiya, whose relationship eventually becomes essential to the film’s broader exploration on identity and fulfillment. Before their story fully unfolds, however, Clarissa establishes another force shaping each character’s life: social class. It is a divide that quietly informs nearly every relationship in the film.
Clarissa grew up wealthy, which is evident from the fact that her family owns the estate where her friends are vacationing and employs chefs and butlers to attend to them.
Present-day Clarissa embodies these values. She takes pride in everything being perfect and expects nothing less from those who work for her. I wouldn’t necessarily describe her as rude, but her tone can be read as blunt and uncompromising. She has something to say about everything. Sometimes her criticisms are justified—like pointing out a crooked piece of artwork that her housekeeper couldn’t see an issue with—but at other times she’s asking her staff to juggle too many tasks at once while still expecting perfection.
That’s why it was so interesting to witness the younger version of Clarissa, who seemed almost like her opposite.
In one scene, she and her friends are dining when her father comes to check on them. Upon noticing that one of the waiters has served food without gloves, he immediately humiliates the man in front of everyone. He then turns his attention to Clarissa and asks why she allowed it. Clarissa responds that she didn’t mind, but her father refuses to accept that answer. He insists that such behavior is unacceptable and should never be tolerated.
It’s our first glimpse of how these characters inherit ideas about success, respectability, and status. Those lessons become the foundation for the film’s central concern: the quiet ways people settle—not only in love, but in the versions of themselves they allow to exist.
Sandra’s story is perhaps the clearest expression of the film’s tragedy. As a teenager, she refuses convention at every turn. Young Sandra, played by Ayo Edebiri, smokes cigarettes as casually as chewing gum, argues that marriage is a social construct created by patriarchy to circumscribe women—a radical perspective for that period and society—and she is queer. Yet when adults enter the room, she puts out her cigarette. She exchanges pleasantries. She respects her elders. Young Sandra was an iconoclast, not stupid.
Yet the adult version of Sandra reveals someone who appears to have traded conviction for comfort- she’s married with a son and lives in a quieter part of the country. Whether that transformation represents genuine evolving or reluctant conformity is left ambiguous , and that is what makes her story so heartbreaking.
I’d say one of the film’s strongest performances comes from Nikki Amuka-Bird, who plays Adult Sandra/Sally. Amuka-Bird communicates so much through the subtlest expressions. Her performance carries years of unspoken disappointment, longing, and resignation.
Peter and Richard represent two different versions of settling. Peter settles because he cannot have the woman he truly loves, while Richard settles because he never pursues the life that genuinely suits him. Their stories mirror one another, yet arrive at different forms of dissatisfaction.
Peter settles because Clarissa does not love him in the way that he loves her, so he moves abroad and marries a White woman. Whether or not that choice is the source of his unhappiness is left ambiguous but he eventually finds himself divorced. Worse still, he has stopped writing—a particular tragedy for anyone who has ever created something meaningful.
Meanwhile, Richard settles because he never pursues the life that genuinely suits him. As a young adult he was an intellectual but he often feels more like an observer than a catalyst in the lives of those around him. He settles for a woman he admires rather than finding someone who truly fits him. That isn’t to say Clarissa is beneath him or that he is superior to her. They simply aren’t right for each other. He doesn’t know her intimately, and she doesn’t care about his world. They aren’t in love, they’re merely existing alongside one another.
Peter, on the other hand, knew Clarissa and loved her for who she was. She just didn’t feel the same way. In their adulthood, Peter still longs for her and for what they might have been.
Clarissa herself remains the film’s greatest mystery. Her emotional arc feels deliberately elusive. I couldn’t understand whether her distance from Peter stems from her evolving understanding of her sexuality, fear of intimacy, or something else entirely. This uncertainty makes me want to revisit the film and take another look at her trajectory.
If the younger characters illustrate the compromises people choose, Septimus and Hadiya reveal the compromises life imposes. Their story initially feels secondary, yet by the film’s conclusion it becomes its emotional center. In their youth, their love is remarkably tender. The intimacy they create through quiet conversation and shared silences is among the film’s most affecting relationships.
What I admired most was the way their story unfolds almost entirely through Septimus’s adult perspective, though we don’t fully realize that until the end. The film handles mental health, specifically PTSD, with remarkable delicacy, particularly within a culture that often celebrates resilience above vulnerability. As an audience member, my heart tightened when Septimus sat in the doctor’s office and said, “I was a soldier when she met me,” while Hadiya sat quietly beside him. This is the story of fighting to hold on to your loved one who’s in a dark space except it feels like they’ve already let go of your hand.
Early in the Q&A, an audience member described the Esiris as filmmakers who reveal “the beauty through the cracks.” By the end of Clarissa, I realized those cracks are not simply visual. They exist within every character who convinces themselves that settling is safer than confronting the uncertainty of becoming who they might have been.
“We all put our greatest fears behind us and settle.” That line captures the film’s tragedy. Putting our fears behind us sounds courageous, but if they’re behind us, we can no longer see them. Perhaps the real act of courage is keeping them in view. Every fear we overcome reminds us that we are, in fact, bigger than it.