Niyi Akinmolayan has never been shy about his ambitions for Nigerian cinema.
With Colours of Fire, he pursues the most expansive version of those ambitions yet: a fantasy epic blending African mythology, sacred magic systems, and elaborate visual effects into a world that announces itself from its opening frames.
Set in a fictional world divided between two tribes, the Blue and the Red, Colours of Fire builds its central conflict on a premise of genuine allegorical power. The enmity between both communities has been sustained not by authentic historical grievance but by manufactured myth, a story told and retold by those for whom tribal hatred is a governing instrument.
When the Blue Tribe sends warrior Akinbode (Uzor Arukwe) to slay a creature believed to have been unleashed by the Red Tribe, he discovers that the monster is less a physical reality than a political one. His encounter with Moremi (Osas Ighodaro), a woman bound by her own tribe’s prophecy, gradually dismantles everything his upbringing has taught him.
Tribalism as a deliberately engineered technology of social control, love as a disruption of inherited political logic, myth as the mechanism through which communities sustain convenient enemies: these are ideas that need no translation for a Nigerian audience.
At its most disciplined, the film trusts this material. There are sequences, largely carried by movement, sound, and visual composition rather than dialogue, where Colours of Fire achieves a genuinely mythic register.
The score, composed by Oludamilola Adewale Aluko and performed by Adam Songbird and Mr. Magick, is particularly effective, sustaining atmospheric and emotional continuity across scenes that the screenplay occasionally abandons.
The difficulty is that the screenplay does not consistently demonstrate the same confidence in its own premise. Where the central allegory demands accumulation—a gradual, felt understanding of how deeply the lie of tribal hatred has penetrated every layer of both societies—the script often substitutes exposition.
We are told, repeatedly and at length, about suffering, about the depth of the division, about what is at stake. The dramatic work of making audiences feel these things is done less reliably. Motivations remain underwritten. Emotional turning points arrive without sufficient preparation.
The film’s use of technology exacerbates this problem. Colours of Fire deploys a combination of green screen, AI-generated visuals, and animation that is, at its best, visually ambitious and, at its worst, actively jarring.
The effects that work are those integrated seamlessly into the film’s texture, sequences where the technology extends the world rather than interrupt it. But as the film progresses, the visual effects grow increasingly inconsistent, shifting from enhancement to distraction.
The AI elements, in particular, feel poorly integrated, too conspicuous, too clearly a shortcut, drawing attention to themselves rather than to what they are meant to enable.
The result is a kind of tonal and visual confusion, moments that pause the story rather than deepen it, and a viewing experience that periodically detaches the audience from the world the film has been working to construct.
Agedengbe, the monster at the centre of the plot, is particularly emblematic: built up as the film’s most consequential threat, its eventual appearance feels more like a VFX demonstration than a dramatic event.
The performances work against these limitations with varying degrees of success. Osas Ighodaro brings genuine presence to Moremi: controlled, physically committed, and capable of communicating interiority even when the script does not provide sufficient space for it. Ibrahim Chatta, as the oracle, Baba Agba, grounds the film’s mythological dimension in something that feels lived rather than performed.
Uzor Arukwe’s Akinbode is a more passive construction by design, a man whose certainties are dismantled rather than asserted, and Arukwe navigates that limitation with quiet competence.
Colours of Fire is not a film that fails through incompetence. It fails, more interestingly, through a confusion of priorities; a belief that technical ambition and narrative ambition are the same thing, when cinema has always insisted they are not.
The world Akinmolayan has built is genuinely impressive. What happens inside it needs more time, more discipline, more faith in the story’s own weight.
The architecture is beautiful. The house, not yet fully liveable.
Joseph Jonathan is a Film & Culture Critic. Catch him on X @chukwu2big