Tunde Olaoye’s “Where Is Mr. Right?” Combines a Timely Subject With a Muddled Plot

Funke Akindele’s Where Is Mr. Right?,  a Nollywood melodrama, released exclusively on Prime, follows event planner Bunmi (Omowunmi Dada) on her near desperate quest for marriage in a film that feels confused about what it aims to be. It bounces from being a social commentary to a thriller, and by the time the credits roll, it has failed to achieve either.

Bunmi is an event planner in her mid-thirties whose desperation for marriage and motherhood has curdled into something closer to obsession. Her  yearning leaks into every conversation she has, turning ordinary small talk into marriage talk. She attends a church where single women dress in wedding gowns and pray fervently, sometimes weeping for the husbands they believe are being withheld from them by a delay only God can explain. It is one of the film’s most honest depictions because it is not exaggeration so much as documentation. For a great many Nigerian women, the pressure Bunmi feels is not fiction. Society, extended family, and religious institutions often measure a woman’s worth against a wedding date or a due date, and a woman who crosses a certain age unmarried is treated less like an individual with her own timeline and more like an unfinished project. Bunmi’s two younger sisters are already married with children, and their presence at every family gathering functions as a silent, constant scoreboard.

Where the film is strongest is in its quieter observations of this pressure and its cost. A couple in Bunmi’s estate, whom she has long admired as proof that marriage delivers the happiness she craves, turn out to be trapped in an abusive relationship. It is a smart, quietly devastating turn, suggesting that the appearance of having “arrived” at marriage can conceal as much as it reveals. Had the makers of this film trusted this narrative and let it breathe, Where Is Mr. Right? might have been a genuinely incisive film about the gap between the marriage Nigerian women are taught to want and the marriages many of them actually get.

Instead, the second half abandons all it had established for a plot that seems to have wandered in from an entirely different production. Bunmi’s neighbor, Bridget (Bisola Ayeola) introduces her to her brother Dexy (Blossom Chukwujekwu), who returned to the country to celebrate his fiftieth birthday, and Bunmi is hired to plan the party. An attraction between Bunmi and Dexy develops, reasonably enough, but the film quickly detours into a domestic altercation between Bridget and her husband that ends in Dexy accidentally killing him. What follows is a cover-up involving Bunmi, Bridget, and Dexy. It seemed as though the writers grew bored of the marriage narrative and reached for melodrama to fill the runtime.

Funke Akindele, appearing intermittently as a nosy neighbor, drifts through several scenes without ever meaningfully touching the plot, which makes her presence feel more like a marketing decision than a storytelling one.

By the time the film reveals, in its final minutes, that the entire murder plot was only a dream Bunmi was having, the twist lands less as a clever narrative device and more as an acknowledgment that the film knew its detour didn’t belong and needed a way out.

Beneath the film’s tangled plotting sits a truth that Nigerian audiences will recognise instantly, even if the film itself loses the thread of it. Bunmi’s ache, her willingness to shrink herself in front of men, her tearful prayers in a borrowed wedding gown, and her silent comparisons to her married sisters, is not far fetched. It is the everyday life of women who are taught, by society and family and casual conversation alike, that a woman’s life only truly begins once marriage is on the table, and that a woman who crosses a certain age unmarried has somehow failed at the one task that mattered.