S16 Film Festival 2025: Mooreoluwa Wright’s “Keys” Plays The Politics of The Obscure

The horror film genre is known for jump scares, dark symbols, a tense, bizarre atmosphere enhanced with effective lighting, colour palettes and requisite sound design, and characters that often come off as strange, underdeveloped and spiritually inclined. Mooreoluwa Wright’s Keys effuses these symptoms over a deserving twenty-three minutes of running time that reflects a repugnant father-daughter relationship. The narrative follows an overbearing father whose actions force his oppressed and isolated daughter to escape from the room where she is locked in and encounter a lurking dark supernatural force in a forbidden room.

The plot of Keys, or what seems like one, unfolds at a slow and tense pace in a residential house, not only vividly portraying the uneven power dynamics at play between the two main characters, but also subtly teasing an intersection between the natural and metaphysical. While the father appears to present himself to his daughter as a morally upright and dutiful father, also posing as a Bible-believing faithful, the sham does not take long to reveal itself. There is an implied backstory that predates the story on screen. Although the film never makes this explicit, the actions, silences, brief talks and visual cues of the characters suggest what is missing—or what it might be. The father appears to belong to a generational occult from which his wealth is derived, and he is implied to be responsible for his wife’s death. While this reading is plausible, the film’s deliberate obscurity leaves room for the viewer to construct their own interpretation of the situation.

An interesting aspect of Keys is its reflection on religion, depicting it as a tool for oppression and manipulation. This is evident in the opening scene where the man enters his daughter’s room, hands her a bible and assigns her verses to be read aloud with which he uses to control and coax her into the version of a lady he wants, stripping her entirely of her own identity and volition as a young adult. In a way, the film’s representation of faith, despite being almost negligible, reminds one of how, even in very secular spaces such as at political gatherings, people make references to faith, religious texts and doctrines as a means of wielding some form of unquestionable authority over their subjects.

Earlier in the film, while conversing with his daughter, the father shows her a key he inherited from his father, a bequest which he claims indicates a trust in the ability to handle the whole mansion. He grants her freedom from the room but soon locks her back in when she breaks the rule of not going beyond the living room. While striving to regain her freedom, the daughter stumbles on a spare key with which she exits the room and discovers her father’s hidden secret. The key bears the weight of responsibility but also signals the transition from ignorance to knowledge. It becomes a metaphor for the revelation of the truth. While the curiosity of the young lady remains unbridled in spite of her father’s embargo, getting a hold of the key fuels it. The film ends tragically for the man and it appears to us that moral justice has been dispensed. Keys finds itself reinvigorating that old Nollywood-esque philosophy of rewarding good and evil accordingly, only that it does so amidst a gory outlook and the dutiful pleasure of inherently unanswered questions.