In The Herd, Daniel Etim Effiong steps behind the camera for the first time and immediately walks into the firing line.
His debut feature isn’t just a thriller about a kidnapping; it is an indictment of a country where danger has become mundane, where joy is a fragile thing easily ruptured by violence. Effiong’s impulse is clear from the opening minutes: Nigeria’s insecurity isn’t a backdrop here; it’s the entire weather system.
The film begins in a space Nigerians know intimately: celebration. A wedding, drenched in warmth and noisy laughter, becomes the brief inhale before disaster.
Derin (Genoveva Umeh) and her wedding party leave the festivities still glowing with the day’s joy, only to be yanked into the forest by men posing as cattle herders.
The transition is abrupt, but intentionally so; Effiong wants the audience to feel that stomach-dropping betrayal of safety. In Nigeria, life can tilt from dancing to running in a matter of minutes.
Once the captives are dragged into the forest, The Herd finds its sharpest footing. Effiong’s direction tightens, and the film becomes a pressure cooker. The forest sequences possess a grim clarity that is tense, unpredictable, sometimes suffocating.
The kidnappers, led by a chillingly assured Abba A. Zakky as Halil, are drawn not as cartoonish villains but as people shaped by desperation and hardened by neglect. The menace is real precisely because it feels painfully plausible.
A strong thread running through the film is the idea of desperation, not just the kidnappers’, not just the families’, but a national kind of desperation that corrodes values and bends every character toward self-preservation.
In moments big and small, the film asks who we become when pushed to the brink. Habiba (Amar Umar), the young woman living in uneasy power among the bandits, embodies this most poignantly. Her survival is both victory and tragedy, and the film doesn’t look away from that tension.
But The Herd doesn’t remain in the bush. It widens its scope, sometimes too ambitiously, to examine societal rot elsewhere. In the city, Gosi’s parents (Tina Mba and Norbert Young) become conduits for another conversation: how prejudice: here, the Osu caste system, can narrow empathy, even in life-or-death situations. Their scenes bristle with frustration, but the commentary is painted so boldly that the subtlety slips.
Not all subplots work as cleanly. There are narrative strands that fray and characters who arrive with emotional promise but leave with little resolution. Effiong’s ambition occasionally outpaces the screenplay’s ability to hold it all together. The film wants to indict institutions, examine cultural fractures, humanise criminals, and track the psychology of victims—all while maintaining thriller momentum. Something was always going to give.
Yet the performances keep the film grounded. Effiong himself plays Gosi with a quiet restraint that avoids the pitfalls of actor-directors who overindulge. Umeh is magnetic, her fear – real fear, not Nollywood-styled hysteria – rippling through the film.
Even the minor characters in captivity find moments of humanity. And when the story veers toward chaos, the actors carry the emotional through-line even when the script doesn’t.
Technically, The Herd is one of Nollywood’s stronger recent attempts at realism within the thriller form. The cinematography shifts from warm intimacy to cold dread without feeling forced; the sound design knows when to let silence do the heavy lifting. A few action beats are overly animated, but the film’s best moments aren’t in the bullets, they’re in the pauses before them.
Most impressive is the film’s linguistic authenticity. Characters move through Igbo, Hausa, Yoruba, Pidgin, and English with ease, creating a texture that mirrors the country’s lived reality rather than a forced multicultural display. It adds heft to the worldbuilding and credibility to the tension.
By the end, The Herd resists the urge to offer comfort. The resolution is expected but uneasy, conscious that real life offers no neat closure. The film understands that the aftermath of violence often lingers longer than the violence itself. When the credits roll, the unease doesn’t fade. It shouldn’t.
For all its narrative missteps, The Herd is a rare Nollywood thriller that treats violence not as spectacle but as a symptom; of poverty, of prejudice, of institutions hollowed out by years of dysfunction. Effiong’s debut may not be flawless, but it is undeniably urgent. It has something on its mind, and more importantly, it wants the audience to have something on theirs too.
**Joseph Jonathan is a Film & Culture Critic. Catch him on X @josiejp3
