“Before We Fall Asleep” Exposes the Unequal Labour of Parenthood

It would be easy to mistake Before We Fall Asleep, the new Zikoko Life short directed by Kaelo Iyizoba and written by Blessing Uzzi, as a story about unemployment and family. Its story is simple enough to summarize in a sentence: Tola (Tobi Bakre)  loses his job, his partner Nazo (Onyinye Odokoro)  becomes the household’s sole earner, and Tola is left to take care of their months-old baby. But what the film is actually interested in is everything that a simple story exposes about how men and women in Nigeria have been taught to think about care and about whose labour counts as work.

The film’s most damning move is its refusal to let Tola’s discomfort pass as sympathetic. He is not written as a villain, but is also not spared. There is a moment where he asks Nazo why she hasn’t handed him her card to use in covering the bills, a small request that exposes a deeper belief: that men are still entitled to the authority and provision even in a season where he is not providing anything. Later, in the middle of an argument, he describes himself as balancing unemployment with “being her nanny,” as though looking after his own child was a service rendered to Nazo rather than his responsibility as a father. The film lets these lines sit without so much dialogue, trusting the audience to recognise the flaw in the logic on its own. It is a more effective indictment than any dialogue could have been, because it comes from a way of thinking that remains depressingly common in typical Nigerian homes.

This is where the film’s argument about parental responsibility becomes most precise and uncomfortable to sit with. Tola’s language betrays him long before his actions do; a father who calls himself a nanny to his own child has already conceded, without realising it, that fatherhood is something other than parenting, a favour extended to the mother rather than a role they both carry. The film traces how a man arrives at such a sentence in the first place, and how thoroughly he has absorbed the idea that a child’s daily survival is fundamentally a mother’s project, and that a father might occasionally support. Nazo, for her part, is never asked to be grateful for the bare minimum. Her fatigue is not softened into a wifely virtue, and the film resists the temptation to make her long-suffering patience the emotional centrepiece the way so much domestic melodrama does. What she wants is not appreciation; while there is that, she is focused more on being honest about where things are at, for the person capable of doing a thing to simply do it, without either party keeping score of who is doing whose job.

What the film understands, and what a great deal of Nigerian domestic drama still doesn’t, is that “helping” is the wrong verb entirely. A man who feeds his child is not assisting his partner; he is discharging a responsibility that was always equally his. The distinction sounds almost too obvious to need stating, and yet the film’s entire dramatic tension is built on how rarely it is actually lived. Division of labour, as Before We Fall Asleep defines it, was never supposed to be a negotiation between a provider and a helper; it is two people managing a shared undertaking according to who has the capacity at a given moment, and the film’s quiet radicalism is in treating that as obvious. Before We Fall Asleep is patient with the distance between where Tola starts and where he needs to get to, but it never pretends that distance is anything other than a problem that could be solved. 

Nazo’s mother (Rita Edochie) provides the film’s other axis of tension, embodying the traditionalist expectation that a household should look a certain way regardless of who is actually capable of running it. Her presence matters because she is a stand-in for an entire generation’s inherited belief, the assumption that role reversal is not an adaptation but a failure, and that a man at home with a child is evidence that something is wrong instead of being seen as a family adjusting sensibly to its circumstances. The film treats her role seriously, which makes the friction between what she expects and what Tola and Nazo’s household actually needs feel more like the quiet, ongoing argument many Nigerian couples have with their own parents, and, more insidiously, with themselves. It is worth noting how differently gendered this same script would be read if reversed. A woman staying home to raise a child while her partner works is legible, even celebrated as devotion, but a man doing the same is treated, by the mother-in-law and by Tola himself, as a kind of diminishment. The film doesn’t resolve that asymmetry so much as hold it up to the light and let the audience feel how little sense it makes once named plainly.

There is also a structural choice worth noting: Tola and Nazo are partners, not spouses. They are building a life and raising a child together outside marriage, and the film treats that arrangement as an ordinary fact of their lives rather than a moral failure. It is a quiet but pointed acknowledgement that the Nigerian family unit no longer maps neatly onto the templates older generations grew up with, and that love, provision, and parental duty do not require a marriage certificate to be real or binding. That choice also raises the stakes of everything the film has to say about division of labour, since an unmarried man in Tola’s position would, in most cases, have every social permission to leave. The film is aware of this option and lets Tola stay anyway, not as a grand gesture but as the unglamorous, daily decision to keep showing up. It is arguably the more honest depiction of what commitment actually requires once the romance has faded.

The film’s emotional register is its other strength. Rather than staging a crisis around infidelity or some external betrayal, the film finds its drama in burnt noodles, disrupted sleep, and the exhaustion of two people trying to renegotiate who they are to each other under pressure. That restraint is what makes the final confrontation between Tola and Nazo land as hard as it does: two people speaking plainly and without cruelty about what they need to do to keep a family standing.

Where the film ultimately settles is not on a verdict about who should take care of the bay and who should be the breadwinner, but on the idea that the question itself is the wrong one. A relationship’s shape should be dictated by its circumstances and capacities, not by an inherited belief neither partner actually chose. Parental responsibility, in the film’s telling, is not divisible by gender at all; it simply falls to whoever is present and able, and the discomfort some viewers feel watching a father do this without complaint says more about the viewer’s conditioning than about the father’s competence. Before We Fall Asleep does not resolve the discomfort it raises about masculinity, provision, and domestic labour so much as it insists the discomfort is worth sitting with. The film trusts its audience to keep arguing long after the credits, and it is better for it.