‘Clarissa’ is a Story About What Happens When the Past Comes to Dinner

Arie and Chuko Esiri’s Clarissa takes Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, moves it to Lagos, and somehow makes the emotional repression feel even more restrictive. With the screenplay written by Chuko Esiri, the film stars Sophie Okonedo, David Oyelowo, India Amarteifio, Toheeb Jimoh, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Ayo Edebiri, and Fortune Nwafor. Almost all were in attendance at the 64th New York Film Festival for it’s NY premiere.

The film opens with young Clarissa (Amarteifio) and Peter (Jimoh) in a post-coital haze, already carrying a kind of tender intimacy with a hint of distance. When Sally (Edebiri) enters her life, her feelings become more complicated. By the time the film jumps forward 20 years, Clarissa is now played by Sophie Okonedo, married, wealthy, restless, and preparing for a dinner party she seems almost angry to be hosting.

Clarissa has built a life that looks enviable from the outside, but she is obviously miserable inside it. She is obsessed with the party, ordering servants around, micromanaging food, controlling the guest list, trying to make everything look perfect because control is apparently easier than admitting you hate your life. I mean, she has the things that are supposed to signal success: a stable marriage, status, wealth, a beautiful home, social standing, but none of it seems to have given her the emotional fulfillment she expected. Then the past starts walking through the door.

Peter returns, now played by David Oyelowo, carrying his own disappointment. He once wrote, once dreamed, and now seems hollowed out by life and regret. Sally represents the road not taken, representing the version of Clarissa that settled. When these people reenter her life, they are not just guests. They force her to confront the possibility that she traded desire, freedom, or authenticity for stability and respectability. Can’t say Clarissa can be blamed for that, but it does bleed into her personality, causing her to be restless, controlling, and overly invested in the party. It’s one thing that gives her something concrete to manage while everything underneath is harder to face.

The country around her is dealing with political instability, and the rise of Boko Haram, but she doesn’t mention how any of that makes her feel. There is a parallel story featuring Septimus (Fortune Nwafor), an idealistic soldier who is suffering the real-world trauma from the country’s dangerous change, and you see him deteriorate physically and mentally. Now, at first that storyline felt disconnected, almost like a different film intruding on this one. Eventually that disconnect becomes the point.

The casting between younger and older versions of these characters is excellent. There is an ease between Amarteifio, Jimoh, Ayo Edebiri, and the younger ensemble that carries over into the older cast. The way these people look at one another does a lot of work. It feels lived-in. You buy that they loved each other, irritated each other, disappointed each other, and then spent years pretending none of it mattered. Okonedo is terrific because she understands that Clarissa is not just unhappy. She is afraid. Afraid to admit what she wants.

The Esiri brothers’ strongest element is what they do with class — they don’t need to scream their critiques. They show it. Clarissa and her circle move through upper-crust Nigerian society with a level of insulation that is almost obscene. They all have enough privilege to obsess over personal dissatisfaction while being largely insulated from the violence and instability around them. That makes their unhappiness more complicated: they have material comfort but still feel trapped by it. At the same time, Clarissa refuses the flat Western image of Nigeria as poverty and dirt roads. Lagos is modern, crowded, wealthy, beautiful, ugly, contradictory. There are skyscrapers, high-rises, markets, servants, privilege, war, beauty, and rot all existing at once. The same thing exists everywhere on the planet.

In the end, Clarissa is afraid to acknowledge who she was, and too much of a coward to admit the life she chose might be the wrong one. That’s why she invites the past over for dinner.

Neon is set to release Clarissa on December 11, 2026.