“The Herd” Is Tense, Brutal, and Uncompromising

A wedding should be the happiest day of your life. For Derin, it becomes the worst. The Herd opens with all the trappings of celebration before armed kidnappers storm in and turn the ceremony into a hostage situation. It’s a jarring shift, deliberate and effective. Director Daniel Etim Effiong (making his feature debut) doesn’t ease you into the violence. He throws you straight in, and the film rarely lets up from there.

This is a thriller built on one of Nigeria’s most pressing crises: the constant threat of kidnapping and banditry. Effiong doesn’t treat it like background noise. He puts it front and center, forcing you to sit with the fear and chaos that too many Nigerians live with daily. The film has its flaws, but its urgency is undeniable.

The story follows Derin, the bride, and Gosi (played by Effiong), whose courage under fire becomes the moral center of the film. While other characters crumble or reveal their true colors, Gosi steps up. It’s a performance that balances vulnerability with quiet strength, and Effiong handles both sides of the camera well. Genoveva Umeh matches him as Derin, bringing raw emotion that never tips into melodrama. Her terror feels lived-in, not performed.

Linda Ejiofor plays Adama, Gosi’s wife, with a devotion that cuts through the chaos. She’s steady when everything around her is falling apart, and Ejiofor makes that steadiness feel like its own kind of bravery. But the real standouts, in the worst way possible, are Gosi’s parents. Played by Tina Mba and Norbert Young, they’re a study in how prejudice poisons everything it touches. The film weaves in the “Nwadiala” and “Osu” issue from Igbo culture, showing how Gosi’s parents rejected his marriage to Adama over caste prejudice. Even as their son fights for his life, they’re still nursing their egos and clinging to their biases. It’s infuriating to watch, which means Mba and Young are doing their jobs perfectly.

Tina Mba, by the way, is fully in her villain era. Between this and The Serpent’s Gift (where she and Linda Ejiofor also played toxic in-laws), she’s carved out a niche playing mothers who make your blood boil. She’s good at it, too good maybe.

The cast doesn’t stop there. Adedimeji Lateef plays a pastor who seems kind at first but turns out to be running an organ trafficking operation. It’s a chilling turn that adds another layer to the film’s examination of how evil hides in plain sight. The kidnappers themselves avoid the usual Nollywood villain tropes. They’re not cartoons or over-the-top caricatures. They’re men hardened by circumstance, which makes them scarier because they feel real. The film even sneaks in a few moments of comic relief without undercutting the tension, a balance that’s harder to pull off than it looks.

Where The Herd stumbles is in its plotting. Some of it you can see coming if you’ve watched enough hostage thrillers. More frustrating are the loose threads. The film zeroes in on Derin and Gosi so much that the other hostages fade into the background. What happened to them? We never really find out. There’s also a subplot about Adama and some arrangement with Gosi’s parents that gets raised but never resolved. It feels like scenes got left on the cutting room floor, and their absence shows.

Still, the film’s strengths outweigh its gaps. Effiong’s direction is assured, building tension through pacing rather than cheap shocks. The opening establishes normalcy just long enough for you to settle in before ripping it away. That tonal whiplash works because he’s earned your investment in these characters first. Technically, the film is solid without being showy. The cinematography shifts from the warmth of the wedding to the cold brutality of captivity. Sound design knows when to lean in and when to pull back, letting silence carry weight in key moments. Production design sells both worlds convincingly.

What lingers most, though, is the film’s refusal to soften its subject matter. Nigeria’s security crisis gets reduced to statistics too often. Effiong makes it visceral. You feel the randomness of the violence, the way it shatters lives without warning. There are no easy answers here, no tidy resolutions that let you leave the theater feeling reassured. That might bother some viewers, but it’s the honest approach. These problems don’t have simple solutions, and pretending otherwise would cheapen what the film is trying to say.

There are moments that hit hard enough to make you audibly react. Not because the film is manipulating you, but because the danger feels immediate and the stakes feel real. It’s the kind of thriller that earns its tension honestly.

The Herd isn’t perfect. It’s predictable in spots, and it leaves questions unanswered. But the performances are excellent across the board, Effiong’s direction is confident, and the film tackles its subject with the seriousness it deserves. For a first feature as director, this is impressive work. For Nollywood, it’s another sign that filmmakers are expanding what the industry can do.

One last thing: can we please stop killing Kunle Remi in the first fifteen minutes of movies? It happened in Yemi Morafa’s The Party, and it happens here too. The man deserves to stick around past the opening credits at least once.

Release Date: October 17, 2025

Runtime: Approximately 2 hours 

Streaming Service: Cinema release  

Directed by: Daniel Etim Effiong  

Cast: Genoveva Umeh, Linda Ejiofor, Daniel Etim Effiong, Adedimeji Lateef, Tina Mba, Norbert Young