Clarissa, the feature film that Arie Esiri and Chuko Esiri directed, premiered at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), which took place a couple of months ago. This was its North American premiere, having premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in France in May 2026. The film reimagines Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway, set in London.
In Woolf’s novel, Clarissa Dalloway looks back on her youth as she prepares for an evening party. Through a stream-of-consciousness narrative and through flashbacks, she remembers her friends, Sally, Richard and, especially, Peter, whom she had rejected for the successful Richard Dalloway. Other characters in Mrs. Dalloway include Septimus, a First World War veteran, Lady Bruton, and Hugh. On the morning of her party, Clarissa hears that Peter is back in town and recently divorced, so she invites him to the party.
In their reimagining, Arie Esiri and Chuko Esiri’s Clarissa keeps most of the key details and characters in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. The cast includes Clarissa (Sophie Okonedo) and her friends: Richard (Jude Akuwudike), Peter (David Oyelowo), and Sally (Nikki Amuka-Bird). And there’s Ugo (Danny Sapani), who I think exists in Mrs. Dalloway as Hugh, and Lady Mariam (Joke Silva). There’s also Septimus Onueke (Fortune Nwafor), a soldier, whom Clarissa knows of through his wife, Aisha (Modesinuola Ogundiwin). Aisha happens to be Clarissa’s tailor. There are other characters replicated from Mrs. Dalloway.
Anyway, in this version, the story is set in Lagos, where Clarissa is planning a party for later that evening. She is obviously a woman of means who moves in the right circles. Through flashbacks, the audience is taken in and out of her life, beginning with when she (India Amarteifio as young Clarissa) and her friends Richard (Ogaranya as young Richard), Peter (Toheeb Jimoh as young Peter Egbe), and Sally (Ayo Edebiri as young Sally) vacationed at her parents’ country home in Abraka, Delta State, Nigeria.
Those were their idyllic days: Peter writing and reciting poems that could have been a Clarissa and Sally love story, with Richard somewhere in the picture. Septimus, who was a First World War veteran in Mrs. Dalloway, is cast as a Nigerian soldier fighting Boko Haram in North-East Nigeria. Through flashback, Norbert Young is introduced as Clarissa’s father.
Away from Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa can stand on its own strength. It can be watched and judged based on its own merits without the knowledge of Woolf’s novel because, even without knowing anything about Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa reads well with contemporary events in Nigeria.
Clarissa’s confusion or fear as a young girl about her feelings for Sally is understandable. Queer romance is still unacceptable in Nigeria. I mean, there is a whole law against it, not to mention the possibility of going to jail. So, her choice of Richard over Peter, which must have seemed like an excellent choice when she was younger, she now is reevaluating. That too is understandable. I bet more people have had those kinds of thoughts before.
At this year’s TIFF, Clarissa was a must-see film for me because of all the good things I had heard about Eyimofe, the award-winning and critically acclaimed 2020 feature also directed by Arie Esiri and Chuko Esiri. I ended up seeing Clarissa twice, and I enjoyed watching Clarissa on both occasions.
I like the flashback scenes to the idyllic country home in Abraka. I like that some issues about sexuality were not managed in a heavy-handed, in-your-face way. Without learning about Mrs. Dalloway, I would not have known that Septimus had some kind of romantic interest in his CO, Evans (Chuks Joseph).
Clarissa’s casting is obviously star-studded and not just for hype. However, I particularly favour the Nigerian-based actors: Fortune Nwafor as Septimus, Chuks Joseph as CO Evans, among others. I also like the music; there is a lot of Victor Uwaifo. It is not every day you hear authentic Edo music in a cinema hall in Toronto.
The only thing that is not clear to me is that out of Nigeria’s three major languages, Igbo is the one language that is not spoken in Clarissa. Hausa and Yoruba are spoken. Understandably, Isoko or Urhobo is spoken, since the Esiri brothers are from Delta State. Did I mishear? This seeming Igbo omission is even more noticeable when Septimus Onueke (an Igbo name) speaks Yoruba, when he breaks down a Yoruba proverb about snails to his wife, Aisha.
Given the circumstances, I would watch Clarissa again, and you should check it out too. It is set for a theatrical release in the US on December 11. No date set for Nigeria yet.
