Directed by Yemi Morafa and produced by Judith Audu, The Party, a three-episode murder mystery series premiered on Netflix on May 30, 2025.
Boasting a reputable cast including Kunle Remi, Kehinde Bankole, Shaffy Bello, Uzor Arukwe, Kelechi Udegbe and Ayoola Ayolola, the series looked poised to deliver on its promise of a rich and engrossing viewing experience in a genre which, admittedly, has not been the forte of filmmakers in Nollwood.
The story begins at the birthday party of Akinbobola Balogun (Kunle Remi), a boisterous socialite and the only son of Chief Akintunde Balogun (Bimbo Manuel) and Chief Mrs Mojoyin Balogun (Shaffy Bello). The birthday guests are thrown into pandemonium when, nearing the end of the toast by his work colleague (James Gardinergh), Akinbobola keels over from his balcony, several stories high, into the swimming pool around which the guests are hosted.
The unraveling of the mastermind behind this high-profile murder forms the central plot of this Nollywood whodunit. Habiba and Etim, the young detectives responsible for unraveling the killer, offer us, the viewers, the sleuth-like prism through which we may also participate in piecing together this puzzle and arriving at a methodological conclusion.
While boasting impressive creative direction and an impeccable cast adept at infusing their characters with the necessary zest, The Party’s script itself is flawed by forced and overdone attempts at planting false clues which fall gravely short of their scribal intent. Through the series of interviews between the detectives and myriad witnesses, the story unfolds primarily through flashbacks, with doubt and aspersion thrown here and about.
Red herrings are integral to the suspense inherent within a murder mystery, but they must not be painfully obvious. They are ‘traps’ which the viewers should not be able to easily detect, and they must truly inspire misdirection and doubt. Without this apparent sense of jeopardy, a murder mystery loses its capacity to elicit and maintain tension.
Little wonder then, that no one falls for the bait that ‘That girl is a witch,’ repeatedly parroted by Chief Mr. and Mrs. Balogun in a bid to direct our attention towards Motunrayo (Kehinde Bankole), Akin’s wife? Indeed, this profiling is similarly echoed by Akin’s friends, who are vocal about Akin’s dramatic attitude change after his marriage. Yet, for all their zest, this angle does nothing to establish probable cause or motive, and, given their general dislike for the character involved, lacked the garb of credibility.
What follows is an even heightened attempt to lead the viewers, albeit unsuccessfully, down a rabbit hole. Akinbobola’s philandering tendencies, conveniently omitted in earlier testimonies, are brought to the fore, in a bid to establish motive with a host of characters.
“Confess!” DCP Moshood thunders at Motunrayo, in a manner we have come to associate with the typical modus of the Nigerian Police. But the nexus sought to be established is weak and does not correlate to a strong enough motive or incentive to commit murder. Like Motunrayo reasonably responds, “My husband is not the first man to get a girl pregnant. And unfortunately, he will not be the last to cheat on his wife.”
This inadequacy of probable cause and motive besmears the interview process with a lack of depth and incisiveness that betrays the initial toga of perceptiveness sought to be imposed on the young officers. Perhaps, due to my legal background and training, I found myself getting increasingly exasperated by a persistent line of questioning which lacked any true cutting-edge or investigative purpose. Like when Habiba, spurred on by an expectant sound effect, sprang from her seat when interviewing Quadri, and looked poised to say something profound, only to ask, “Mr Borokini, you’re saying if you kill someone, we won’t be able to find the body?”
Perhaps, recognizing the futility of the present approach, another bombshell is dropped out of the blue, Akinbobola is revealed to have been suffering from cardiac arrythmia and his blood work reveals traces of hydrocodone which could have precipitated a cardiac arrest. The spotlight turns once more to his already beleaguered wife, Motunrayo, since hydrocodone is an opioid, a pharmacist would typically have access to (how they discover she is a pharmacist, nobody really knows). Not only this, but the help also employed by Chief Mr. and Mrs. Balogun has further implicated Motunrayo by divulging to the detectives that, immediately following Akin’s death, she was seen in his study frantically searching for something. What is this ‘something’? Motunrayo declines to answer. There is no apparent reason for this refusal to disclose the object of her search, given its non-incriminatory nature. Her forced silence will only serve as the springboard to push the plot towards its final act by making her the prime suspect and necessitating her arrest.
Only in the series’ final episode does true jeopardy build. Chief Mr. and Mrs. Balogun are roped into the web of possible suspects when it is revealed that they have been embroiled in a legal furore over ownership of the property which they all occupy as tenants. Could the victim’s parents turn out to be his killer? Now this is a twist no one could have seen coming. Not only this, we get to know about Chief Mr. Balogun’s precious “secret”, his four daughters and a parallel family maintained outside his marriage, a secret conveniently kept hidden from his wife for over 20 years and which Akinbobola employs to blackmail him and obtain legal ownership of the building. As this costly secret gets unraveled before Mrs. Balogun, she will remember the prophecy made much earlier by her spiritual father, known simply as ‘Apostle’ (Jude Chukwuka) that, “Somebody will come in the guise of an Angel and will give you a very spotless gift.” This unraveling will push the plot to its final resolution.
The themes of betrayal, power, corruption, greed, lust, as well as the influence of the spiritual on the mundane within the Nigerian society are all depicted in The Party. The visuals and sound effects relay a conscious intention to accentuate an apparent sense of tension and foreboding, such as the heavy detail on the body language of the witnesses, Mrs Balogun’s staggered remembrances of the Apostle’s prophecy and the ensuing fracas at the police station when Chief Balogun’s mistress is exposed, the latter’s vituperations in her local dialect laced with a tinge with melodrama.
Shaffy Bello offers us a wholesome demonstration of dramatic excellence in the execution of her role as a mourning and bereft Nigerian mother, one who would later stumble upon even more soul-crushing truths. Her makeup smeared by her excessive wailing, her inner turmoil would instill the series’ general ambience with a poignancy and sadness difficult to escape right till the very end.
The sub-plot of covert institutional corruption rears its head in the frequent clashes between young Habiba and Etim, and their superior, DCP Moshood. These clashes would come to symbolize the continuing existential battle throughout history between the old and the new, the gatekeepers of the status quo and the restless proponents of positive change. This sub-plot will reach its climax when Habiba, spurred by her own frustration and personal history, squares up to her boss at the police station and tells him in defiance, “Some of us just want to do our work well and catch actual criminals.” It would appear that this battle is won, even if pyrrhic, by the old order, as Moshood looks through the glass prism much later, a smirk evident on his lips as he says, “I told you. Things are never the way we want them to be.”
Humor is infused tersely within this tense murder mystery, most times, devoid of smooth transitions. The help’s retort, ‘tea or coffee,’ to a request by the young officers for her to vacate the crime scene was, to put it mildly, quite cringey, as was the physical arousal of DCP Moshood during the interview with Tope Olowoniyan. Despite its glaring limitations, for viewers not obsessed with edge-of-the-seat tension typical of murder mysteries, The Party represents Nollywood’s most impressive foray into a difficult genre.
3/5.
**Chinonso Nzeakor is a legal practitioner with interest in poetry and the arts. Catch him on X @chinonsokenned1
