“Siraam”, “Fleabag”, and the Architecture of the Messy Young Woman

There is a particular kind of woman cinema has only recently made room for: the one who is not likeable in any conventional sense, who makes the wrong choice again and again, who loves people who have already decided not to love her back, and who is still, somehow, the moral centre of her own story. The British Emmy-winning series Fleabag gave English television its most enduring version of her. Siraam, the new short from Zikoko’s Life anthology, gives Nollywood one of its own. The comparison isn’t a stretch, and it isn’t flattery-by-association.

 Siraam, written and directed by the rom-com blockbuster and Call of My Life star and scribe Uzoamaka Power, starring Genoveva Umeh as the lead, arrives at the same emotional address as Fleabag. Siraam follows a young woman undone by a man who won’t commit, showing her steadying herself through humour, prayer, and the unglamorous business of getting on with her day. What connects the two isn’t structure — Siraam doesn’t break the fourth wall like the lead in Fleabag does, doesn’t address the camera, doesn’t borrow Fleabag‘s specific stagecraft. What connects them is temperament, and that shared temperament shapes how each story shows what happens when a woman gives too much of herself to the wrong people.

Neither film is about promiscuity, though both flirt with the language of a cautionary tale long enough to reject it. Fleabag uses sex the way some people use silence to avoid a conversation she isn’t ready to have with herself. Siraam’s chaos is similar: not recklessness for its own sake, but a woman trying to fill a specific, man-shaped absence with whatever’s available. The real flaw in both cases is wanting the wrong person, specifically, and organising an entire emotional life around a man who was never going to want her back. 

What’s striking is how seriously both treat the devastation that follows. Some films would have played Siraam’s prayer—pleading with God to take the pain away, promising devotion in exchange—for laughs, the kind of scene Nollywood often reaches for when a woman’s heartbreak needs deflating into comic relief. Here it isn’t mocked, so it can land with its full weight. That’s the same instinct that makes Fleabag’s bus-stop ending land the way it does: no scoring of points, no melodrama, just a woman left alone with the shape of what she’s lost. Both works seem to understand that if a broken heart is taken seriously, it doesn’t need to be dressed up as tragedy to feel like one.

Both stories also understand that the worst heartbreaks aren’t always the ones with names. Fleabag‘s central romantic wound isn’t a marriage or even a breakup —it’s a man who tells her, essentially, that loving her would cost him something he’s not willing to pay, and leaves anyway. Siraam’s paramour Zubie occupies similar territory: present enough to be loved, absent enough to never be held accountable, gone the moment accountability arrives in the form of a pregnancy scare and, later, someone else’s wedding ring. This is the particular cruelty of the undefined relationship —the situationship, what it’s called now. There’s no framework for grieving something that was never named, no socially sanctioned mourning period for a man who was never technically your boyfriend. Both stories sit in that limbo without rushing their heroines out of it, letting the pain be disproportionate to the relationship’s official size, because anyone who has lived through one of these knows the size was never the point. It is its own kind of waiting room —for a decision the other person has already quietly made but simply never announced.

None of this lands the way it does by accident. Fleabag was written by a woman about a woman’s interior life, unconcerned with making its protagonist digestible for anyone else’s comfort. Siraam is a story about sexual and reproductive health, friendship, and self-respect told from inside the experience rather than as a warning issued from outside it. That distinction matters especially in how each story handles sex and its consequences. Because Fleabag doesn’t moralise its heroine’s choices, it can treat her sexual history as a coping mechanism rather than a character flaw to be punished. Siraam extends the same courtesy: the pregnancy scare, the STI test, and the eventual decision to take charge of her own sexual health are all filmed with a matter-of-factness that Nigerian screens don’t always allow women. There’s no puritanical lens hovering over these scenes, no implicit lecture, just a woman learning, slowly and imperfectly, what it means to advocate for herself.

It’s the small things that keep both women from tipping into an archetype. Siraam speaking into a blowing fan, drying her underwear on it, playing with sticky notes in a doctor’s office in the seconds before a life-altering result- these are the kind of beats a tidier script would cut for efficiency, in favour of jumping straight to the plot-relevant moment. Instead, we get the woman before the moment, so the scene reveals how ordinary motion makes the story feel real. Fleabag works the same way, in its own register: the deflecting jokes, the habit of narrating her life to an audience that may or may not be listening, the small physical comedies of a woman who has learned to perform composure long before she’s actually found any. Genoveva Umeh has spoken about approaching Siraam with a kind of whimsy —the idea that a woman can build a sense of self and possibility even inside an environment that doesn’t hand her either. That whimsy isn’t decoration. It’s a survival technique, the same one “Siraam”, “Fleabag”, and the Architecture of the Messy Young Woman relies on when she turns to camera instead of to the people who might actually ask her how she’s doing.

And in both cases, it isn’t the romance that ends up saving her. Fleabag’s real reckoning happens in her relationship with her sister Claire; messy, competitive, occasionally cruel, and ultimately the only bond in her life built to survive her. Siraam’s equivalent is her friendship with Chidaalu, rendered with the same lived-in, quarrel-and-reconcile naturalism, the kind of female friendship that doesn’t need to be dramatised to register as real. Both stories seem to arrive, independently, at the same conclusion: the men come and go, sometimes literally to the altar with someone else, but the friendship is the structure that holds things up.. Because that bond lasts where romance doesn’t, it becomes a quieter, less cinematic love story, and both works trust it enough to let it carry the emotional ending instead of the romance.

What Siraam and Fleabag have in common is a rare, specific fluency in the emotional grammar of a certain kind of woman: funny about her own pain because the alternative is unbearable, loyal to the wrong people, longer than she should be, and slowly, unglamorously, becoming someone she can live with. Siraam signifies Nollywood might finally be catching up to a kind of story British and American television found its footing on years ago, one where a flawed, chaotic, yearning woman doesn’t have to be redeemed to be worth watching. She stays honest, in her own language and in her own room, with her own fan blowing warm air across a heartbreak no one else can see.