“Through Their Eyes” and the Limits of Parental Acceptance in Nigeria

Nollywood’s record on queerness is so poor that a film only has to treat a queer-coded character as a human being to feel like an event. Through Their Eyes, the 2026 drama directed by Biodun Stephen, does that and more. It is also a film that gets cold feet in its final act. The surprising part is that the cold feet end up producing its most honest scene.

It opens in media res, dropping us straight into a matchmaking session between two obvious mismatches, and the decision pays off. A mother and father have arranged a meeting between their son Ejiro, “EJ” to everyone, and a polite young woman named Chika. There are no character introductions and no table-setting, because that one scene tells us everything we need to know about EJ and his family. EJ, played by Charles Born, is a 25-year-old skincare influencer, and he arrives in a robe and turban, reapplying lip gloss. Chika side-eyes the whole look and cannot hold his gaze. EJ, tongue firmly in cheek, asks whether she thinks they’d make a good match. She turns to the parents in alarm to confirm he was really the man she was sent to meet. He has already lost interest, tells her she is not his type, and goes back to his lip gloss. The joke is visual, the timing is sharp, and it tells us everything about EJ and the parents who refuse to see him.

The film’s strongest stretch is the domestic fallout, which captures an argument many queer Nigerians will know by heart. At a tense dinner following the failed meet-cute, EJ’s parents attack him for embarrassing them, and he points out that he could have been a ritualist, an armed robber or a fraudster, yet the offence they cannot forgive is that he is “flamboyant.” The point lands because it is true to life. In a homophobic culture, hard work, decency and good character count for nothing against the one trait the parents cannot stomach. EJ’s defence, that he is simply metrosexual, reads as an obviously queer young man who is not hiding it but just cannot say what he is out loud in a country that criminalizes it. EJ’s mother clearly adores him but just wants him to be “normal,” but his father does not even try to hide his open contempt for EJ. He blames his wife for what is wrong with “her son,” as if she conceived him all by herself, a familiar reflex in many African homes where fathers collect the credit and mothers collect only the blame.

EJ is thrown out and lands in the spare apartment of the landlord, Mr Johnson, a widowed, judgmental man who allows him to crash but is openly disgusted by him. He assumes the phone calls he overhears EJ on are conversations with male lovers, when they are only clients, a neat illustration of how quickly hypersexuality is projected onto queer men. EJ rushes him to hospital after a collapse, despite how he has been treated, then cooks for him daily and nurses him back to health. An apology is offered and accepted, and a friendship forms. Femi Jacobs, as Mr Johnson, is spot-on casting, and his chemistry with Born makes the familiar and cliché thaw and odd-couple dynamic feel convincing and earned. When Mr Johnson admits he has been estranged from his only child since discovering she is gay, EJ urges him to apologise and to try to see things from her side, as he has done with EJ.

This is also where Born gets to show range. Until now he has been mostly dry one-liners and comic ease, and here the hurt of being rejected by his parents for being his authentic self finally breaks through the nonchalance. Mr Johnson takes the advice, and the daughter comes to see him. The reconciliation is modest, and the film does not pretend otherwise. He does not claim to understand or accept her, only that he wants her in his life and they will work out the rest. Then he goes to EJ’s mother and pleads with her not to waste the years he wasted. It is the film’s clearest argument that people should be judged by their hearts rather than by the beliefs that divide them. Familiar territory, yes, but still a step worth noting in a Nigerian setting.

Then comes the swerve. Just as EJ’s mother returns with Mr Johnson, ready to tell her son she accepts him as gay, it is revealed that he has had a girlfriend all along. She explains that the softness his parents despise is exactly what she loves, since he understands her needs better than most men. We in the audience were as quick to assume as the characters were. EJ had said from the start that he was only metrosexual, and we never believed him. Mr Johnson, stunned, even asks about EJ’s performance in the bedroom, a moment of invasive comedy that sits oddly beside the sincerity around it.

In reality, the twist is a cop-out. It rescues the film from its own premise at the moment the parents are finally ready to be generous, and the reveal turns acceptance into a technicality. Thankfully, Charles Born’s performance saves it with its final beat. When his mother says she is relieved he isn’t gay, he asks through tears, “What if I was, Mum?” The film ends with her pleading while he looks on, wounded, and the question goes unanswered. It is a peculiar and ballsy ending, and the discomfort is deliberate. EJ is devastated not because he is secretly gay but because he now knows how quickly he would have been discarded if he were. Meanwhile, Mr Johnson’s daughter remains openly, proudly gay at the close, and her father still stands by her.

Context matters here. Early Nollywood treated queer characters as predators, home-wrecking lovers, or people in need of deliverance, and set a template of rape, suicide, and prayed-away spells that took years to loosen. The few more humane films since, among them Hell or High Water and All the Colours of the World Are Between Black and White, have mostly come from independent filmmakers, NGOs or foreign backing, not from the industry’s major distributors. Even the better ones still lean on the idea of queerness as a burden to be wrestled with. Through Their Eyes arrives from the mainstream end of the market, which is why its compromise is easier to forgive than to ignore.

It is a flawed film, then, and the ending will frustrate anyone who wants a plain or bold statement. But its refusal to resolve the tension between Nigerian parents and their queer children is more truthful than a tidy reconciliation would have been. For now, with a representation record this thin, that makes it one of the better attempts we have.