“LandLine”: A Time-loop Narrative Undermined By Unfulfilled Ending 

Dele Doherty’s Landline is a Prime Video psychological thriller that he wrote, produced, and directed himself. The narrative is structured around the time loop, a device previously employed in Moyinoluwa Ezekiel’s 2024 film The Beads where the protagonist relives a tragic wedding day in a repetitive nightmare. Landline casts Zainab Balogun—who coincidentally portrayed the protagonist of The Beads—in the lead role as Shalewa, alongside Gabriel Afolayan who plays her husband Kola, and Bucci Franklin doubling as a policeman and masked killer.

In Landline, there are three embodied characters, while the other characters are revealed through voiceovers. The film follows Shalewa, pregnant wife of Kola, a military officer held up by his superiors in a secluded location where he has to stay away from his family for security reasons. Kola maintains telephone communication with his wife and father, taking care not to reveal his whereabouts and plans as he assures Shalewa of a physical reunion. Soon, an anonymous caller contacts Kola via an abandoned landline, alerting him to protect his wife from imminent danger. As the story unfolds, events eerily repeat in a loop, heightening tension and suspense.

The time loop is a storytelling technique that involves the repetition of a sequence of events, with the same set of characters reliving the action in hopes of breaking out of the circle of repetition. Time loops constantly revert to the default action mode when the characters reach a dead end; the characters keep experiencing this loop, developing a different strategy at every effort to bypass it and permanently solve the problem. While the time loop is not a common feature of most narratives, it can be adopted in experimental, fictional stories to enhance dramatic tensions or for comedic effects. Doherty’s Landline generates tension that keep us in anticipation of what fate will eventually befall Shalewa as Kola tries to protect her from being killed by an unknown assailant. An atmosphere of apprehension and mystery persists throughout.

The time loop is often confused with time travel, a plot device that is closely associated with the sci-fi genre and involves characters travelling into the past or future in hypothetical circumstances. Time travel is, for instance, used in Akay Mason and Abosi Ogba’s Day of Destiny, a 2021 Nollywood film about two brothers who teleport into the past twenty years back to change the family’s fortunes. Filmmakers often leverage the time loop and time travel devices to explore themes about the complexity of human existence.  We see this in The Beads where the filmmaker links the bizarre, magical potential of the inherited beads worn on Ranti to her entrapment in a fatal dreamscape. Similarly, in Landline, Doherty uses the time loop to explore the cryptic circumstances of Kola’s hiding and hint at systemic duplicity in the Nigerian military.

In filmmaking, ambition is a virtue. When carefully managed, it births glorious moments for the filmmaker through commercially successful, critically acclaimed inventive narratives. An ambitious filmmaker is capable of redefining the trajectory of storytelling in his region and contributing purposefully to the future of the industry. An example of this is C. J. Obasi who, through his 2023 black-and-white surrealist film Mami Wata, paved the way for Nigerian stories at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival. However, ambition, when handled with less tact, becomes detrimental to the filmmaker, compromising the vision of his project. Because it often involves the filmmaker navigating a previously unchartered terrain or attempting to institutionalize a filmmaking culture that is mostly foreign to the society in which the story is set, there is a possibility of telling stories that feel inorganic, seem too detached from immediate imagination or veer off track altogether. For this reason, Nigerian filmmakers are likely to find it hard to connect with domestic or African audiences through genres like science fiction and space travel. We have a sense of this in the general apathy towards Nollywood films such as Day Of Destiny and Niyi Akinmolayan’s Kajola, both of which are sci-fi movies.

Doherty’s ambition in Landline makes for an interesting case. It is clear from the outset that he wants to stand out, as pictured in the opening puzzling dreamscape that shows Shalewa, led by a strange call, leaving the kitchen for the living room where she is stunned to discover four corpses of her lookalikes before getting shot in the head. This spooky start, enough to get us hooked, compares to those of films like The Beads where Ranti is shot by a man on her wedding day, and Femi Adebayo’s Seven Doors where a group of doomed women fall off a cliff in what looks like a ritual suicide. Together with other minimalist approaches in characterization, setting, and plot, Doherty positions himself as an avant-gardist. His film possesses a noirish charm, a bit similar to Taiwo Egunjobi’s A Green Fever—except that efforts to portray the militaresque ambiance in Doherty’s work, if they really exist, pale considerably.

The minimalist strength of Doherty’s narrative, however, is its Achilles heel. There is, for instance, the desperate voice of an unseen Tofunmi identifying Shalewa as her mother in the opening dream scene. The voice turns out to be a hoax, but the filmmaker also misses the chance to connect this name to the rest of the story. Does Shalewa have a daughter? Or did she, in the past, lose a daughter whose name was Tofunmi? We do not know.

Following a revelatory moment in the build-up to the ending, Kola tells Shalewa over a phone call “The people who I work for plan to assassinate you tonight, but I received the information early with the help of someone”. This suggests that Mr Osheni, Kola’s superior, is responsible for the conspiracy against Kola’s family. But we do not know what exactly the commander’s treacherous motivations are. Neither do we have details of the operation that Kola got involved in. We also do not have enough information about Mr Osheni’s personality, and the identity of the mystery caller remains unrevealed. With these loose ends, the film fails to fulfill its potential, leaving us in the dark. The resolution feels halfhearted. It is as though the filmmaker’s obsessive artsiness overwhelms audience satisfaction.