“The Serpent’s Gift” Explores Grief and the Price of Inheritance

Death and inheritance have always been fertile ground for drama.

In The Serpent’s Gift, Kayode Kasum steps into this space with a story about wealth, legacy, and the violence of tradition. The set-up is straightforward: Nduka Sylvanus (Chico Aligwekwe), a successful businessman, dies suddenly, and his young widow Ijeoma (Linda Ejiofor-Suleiman) is left to defend herself and her late husband’s estate from in-laws who see her as disposable. It’s a story Nollywood has circled before, but one with endless possibilities if handled with care.

Kasum’s film certainly signals ambition. It wants to shine a light on practices that still make widowhood a brutal experience for women in some parts of the country, while also exploring greed within a family empire. But the way the film approaches these ideas often undercuts its own intentions. Instead of asking why some of these practices linger or how modern families resist them, the film stages them as isolated spectacles — the kind of scenes designed to shock more than to deepen understanding. Watching Ijeoma being forced through a ritual walk or pressured to drink water used to clean her husband’s body, the viewer feels the weight of cruelty, but not the context that explains why these acts still find space in today’s Igbo society.

That tendency to flatten culture into image rather than lived reality shows up elsewhere. Dialogue makes generous use of Igbo phrases and proverbs, but the world surrounding them doesn’t always hold together. Nduka’s office, for instance, is oddly dressed with random political posters, and a branch of his company in Ibadan has staff speaking only Igbo, as though the city’s linguistic mix doesn’t exist. Details like these may sound small, but they chip away at believability. A story that positions itself as culturally rooted has to earn that claim through consistency, and here the gaps are too visible.

The film also stumbles in how it stages events that should carry enormous symbolic weight. A titled man’s burial, in Igbo tradition, is not a side note but a spectacle of its own — elaborate, social, and deeply ritualized. In The Serpent’s Gift, the funeral feels muted, rushed past rather than given the space to establish why Nduka’s legacy matters. When the foundation is this shaky, the family’s fight over his wealth loses some of its urgency.

Still, it would be unfair to dismiss the film entirely, because its cast gives more than the script sometimes allows. Linda Ejiofor-Suleiman delivers the standout performance. Her Ijeoma is not just a grieving widow but a woman calculating how to survive a system set up to erase her. She carries  authority in the courtroom of family politics, her silences speaking as much as her confrontations. Even when the script leans on melodrama, Ejiofor-Suleiman grounds it in something raw.

Opposite her, Stan Nze brings fire as Nonso, Nduka’s brother, but his performance risks slipping into one-note aggression. His outbursts feel designed more for volume than complexity, and the character never quite escapes caricature. Tina Mba, as the matriarch Adaora, brings bite to every scene, yet the role edges close to the stock Nollywood villain mother-in-law — effective but familiar. Chico Aligwekwe, though gone early in the story, leaves a presence strong enough to haunt the conflict that follows.

On the technical side, the film swings between striking and flat. Cinematography occasionally captures the lushness of the Southeast with wide, breathing shots, but interiors often look generic, as though borrowed from soap-opera sets. Editing doesn’t always help either: some sequences drag, while others cut short before emotions have settled. The music is more consistent, a blend of highlife and contemporary scoring that gives the film a cultural feel, even when the storytelling wavers.

Kasum’s career makes comparison inevitable. His earlier film Afamefuna: An Nwa Boi Story carried its flaws, but it felt rooted in lived details of the Igbo apprenticeship system, and audiences embraced it for that reason. The Serpent’s Gift, by contrast, feels caught between wanting to honor Igbo traditions and wanting to magnify them for spectacle. The balance never fully comes together.

The film’s strength lies in its themes: widowhood as vulnerability, family as battlefield, and the fragile line between tradition and exploitation. These are urgent issues, and Nollywood is right to keep returning to them. But The Serpent’s Gift leaves the impression of a story told half-way, more interested in dramatic rituals than in the subtler negotiations that shape how people actually live these tensions.

As a whole, the film is uneven. It has powerful moments, anchored by Ejiofor-Suleiman’s performance, but its world-building flaws and reliance on spectacle keep it from resonating as it should. Kasum is a director with clear admiration for Igbo culture, but admiration isn’t enough. To tell stories like this with weight, the small details must be as carefully handled as the big ideas.

In the end, The Serpent’s Gift doesn’t collapse, but it doesn’t soar either. It sits in that middle space — watchable, sometimes moving, but also frustrating for what it could have been if it had trusted authenticity over ornament. For a story about legacy, the irony is that the film itself leaves behind less than it promises.

Release Date: August 29, 2025

Runtime: Approximately 2 hours

Streaming Platform: None,Cinematic Release

Director: Kayode Kasum

Cast: Linda Ejiofor-Suleiman, Tina Mba, Beverly Osu, Stan Nze, Chico Aligwekwe, Beverly Osu, Daniel Etim Effiong, Ric Hassani, and Tracey George.