She Is

She Is tells the story of an unmarried young lady in her 40s (played by Somkele Iyamah) who has a one sided crush on her single pastor. After that love interest falls through, she soon discovers that she will have to decide between waiting for Mr. Right and never being able to have a child.

This summary really just grazes the surface of the plethora of things that She Is is about. The biggest problem with this movie really is that it’s not a very cohesive film. The experience of watching this film is very similar to taking a bite of what you expect to be cake only to be met with the taste of raw cane sugar at first, and then milk, then water and butter, and whatever else it is they use to make cake. The point here is not that the story should have chosen only one thing to be about – either the struggles of spinsterhood, the fertility journey in Nigeria, or the romance. The point, instead, is that someone should have taken a moment to coalesce these aspects of the story together so that when presented it appears as a cohesive whole.

And this problem of cohesion doesn’t just apply to the story. It applies to everything from the cinematography, the directing, the music, the editing, the coloring, the performances, and everything in between. There was some beautiful music by the producers (Waje Iruobe and Omawumi Megbele) scattered throughout this movie, but the problem was the obvious feeling of it being ‘scattered’ in the movie. The editing was just checking off stereotypical check boxes of insert sound clip here, insert motivational music here, insert romantic score here, insert slow motion here, etc. Nothing feels organic unfortunately and this cripples much of the film.

The weak story is met by an uninspiring performance alongside sorely lacking graphics, in such a way that the overuse of unnecessary celebrity cameos here and beautiful sets cannot do anything to salvage. Somkele isn’t given much to work with in the character of the protagonist, and the little that she is given isn’t enough to retain anyone’s attention for the extent of the movie. The comic relief moments are few and far between, so even that can’t sustain the audiences attention. In all fairness, the movie seems like a shoddy first draft and we’re still awaiting the final version.