Thicker Than Water is a Nollywood psychological thriller and supernatural mystery that was released to Prime Video on October 10th, 2025. Directed by Yomi E. Adejumo, the film was written by Yemi Nexus Adeyemi and has a runtime of 1 hour, 46 minutes. It follows a young reporter and her menacing quest to discover the truth behind her sister’s disappearance.
Premise
The film begins by introducing us to two little girls; Ese, and her older sister Onome, who seem to cherish each other deeply.
Years later, in Ile Agbadami, an extremely rural community on a small island, Ese, now a journalist, has arrived under the guise of research, but her true motive is to explore Onome’s last known whereabouts. Onome has been missing for a while now and even presumed dead, and Ese hopes to find clues by exploring and investigating Onome’s former apartment and community. She meets Kazeem, who was apparently a close friend to Onome during her stay in the community. Kazeem explains that they had been searching for any member of Onome’s family since her disappearance, but Ese simply admits that they haven’t been in touch for a while now.
Ese’s first day in the community is seemingly uneventful, the only exception being a moment where she is startled by a ‘insane man’ staring at her, but he is easily run off by a local seller.
The following day, Kazeem casually reveals that the police have stopped investigating Onome’s disappearance, deeming the case unsolvable, to an outraged Ese. And after a call with her best friend Chioma, Ese finds Onome’s extremely detailed journal. And through reading it, she finds out about Onome’s former lover, Ola.
While taking scenic pictures, Ese notices a lot of missing person posters, including Onome’s. She checks in with Kazeem to ask about Ola. Kazeem reveals that Ola, devastated after Onome’s disappearance, packed up and left town without telling anyone. He also says that Ola was a ‘hustler’, doing anything he could to secure a better life for himself and Onome. That includes being determined to migrate overseas, legally or otherwise, the latter of which is the cause of so many missing people, as explained by Kazeem.
Understanding that there is nothing more for her to do, Ese decides to leave town early the next morning. But she is stopped when a violent storm damages her car, causing her departure from the village to be delayed by another week.
Later that day, she attends the village’s storytelling session, when a folktale is shared about a powerful magic jewel; Ajelesi. The search for Ajelesi had claimed the lives of many young men. However, only one man was successful – Ajisafe, who aimed to use the jewel’s power to heal his sick wife, Olayemi. Not only did Ajelesi heal Olayemi, it gave both her and Ajisafe new powers and bodies. However, it also turned them to the dark side; Olayemi became a bitter, angry goddess, with Ajisafe at her side as cruel enforcer/executioner, and together they reigned terror on the entire land. The three kings of the region then united to defend their people, using another precious stone to conquer Ajelesi from Olayemi’s body. However, her spirit remains restless, searching high and low for a new host body…
After the story, Ese is back in Onome’s apartment, reading her journal again. She discovers that Ola and Onome had actually been engaged. However, when Onome discovered that she was pregnant, Ola vehemently tells her to abort the child, leading to a huge argument. Ese confronts Kazeem about this information and why he kept it from her, getting increasingly agitated about the entire community’s silence about Onome’s disappearance. To which Kazeem tells her that Onome is dead, and confronts Ese for only caring so much about her now after she’d kept her distance for years. Ese then explains that she and Onome had grown up poor with their mother, who worked herself to the bone to ensure their survival, but eventually fell sick, leaving the responsibility to the girls. Fed up with the burden, Onome leaves them, despite Ese’s multiple pleas. And when their mother dies, Ese is left alone. Her resentment towards Onome’s abandonment is what caused such a wide divide between them…which Ese now regrets.
Reading Onome’s journal again, Ese finds that Onome had begrudgingly gone along with Ola’s request to get rid of the child. However, this had soured their relationship to some extent. Immediately after this, Ese is haunted by a vision of Onome begging her to find and save her.
The next night, Ese attends a festival, accompanied by Kazeem, who explain that the entire community follows one deity, even driving out the church that attempted to settle there years ago. Ese catches the same insane man from earlier staring at her once again. When she asks Kazeem about it, he explains that the man is named Tiny, and he is not insane. The rumor goes that Tiny’s father had once tried to force his soul into Tiny’s body, seeking to achieve eternal youth. However, the spell went awry, and now Tiny’s soul constantly wars with his father’s inside his own body, rendering him mentally and spiritually scarred.
Reaching home to Onome’s apartment that night, she finds out that it has been broken into. Fearing for her safety, Kazeem insists that she spends the night at his. When she goes back to the apartment, she finds it trashed, but then numerous clues point to a written message left for her:
FIND ME. I’M STILL HERE. HELP ME, ESE.
This takes both us and Ese down a rocky and horrific path to the answer as she discovers why Onome was in the community to begin with and what truly became of Ola and their unborn child, the real truth of what happened to Onome and Kazeem’s role in all of it, and a final confrontation between sisters leading up to a menacing end.
Cast and Performances
- Adaobi Dibor as Ese
- Bimbo Ademoye as Onome
- Taye Arimoro as Kazeem
- Damilola Ogunsi as Ola
Um…the characters in this film were confusing at best (the entire film was confusing, but we’ll get to that), with the exception of Ese. Likewise, the actor who plays her, Dibor, practically carried this movie on her back in terms of acting performance. Bimbo Ademoye also really gave the best she could with her somewhat limited screentime, but even that became scratchy towards the end.
The plot twist also did very little for character progression, especially with an ending like that. It’s almost as if the ending was written purely for shock value, because it leaves way too many holes not only in the plot, but for the characters as well. So, they would have me believe that every single one of Ese’s experiences in looking for Onome was fabricated to lure her. But how? The person named Ola did exist, but they would have me believe that it was Kazeem the whole time? Various things didn’t make sense. Which is a shame because the entire film seemed to be a build up and nothing that was revealed to us in the end could ever fully satisfy the anticipation that they spent the entire film cooking up.
And why was Tiny involved in anything? What attachment did he have to Ese that prompted him to go from staring at her endlessly to trying to be her hero in the end? There was simply nothing there.
Despite my grievances, I will give credit where credit is due. The on-screen chemistry was something remarkable. I was practically cooing and giggling like a teenager as I watched Ese and Kazeem seemingly fall in love. And the flashback argument between Ese and Onome when Onome was about to abandon them was so raw and real that it triggered some real life feelings within me.
What I Liked and Disliked
I was truly in love with the cinematography of this film. It was bold, beautiful, and gritty. Kudos to the image director for giving us a very unique style of capturing the scene, scenes that our main character utilizes effortlessly. Adaobi Dibor is a very beautiful woman. And the unique filming style really made me feel like she was part of the art, not merely existing within it. Truly, this was something special.
Until it was desecrated with A.I., that is.
A.I. in Nollywood does not surprise me (I’d argue that it took them a lot longer to begin implementing it than I expected it to.) But in this movie, it felt really uncanny and out of place. And my itch in the scalp is that the scenes that used said A.I. could’ve very well done without it anyway! We did not need generated imagery to depict a scene of three different kings, and on top of that, the A.I. practically gave them all the same face. I give a little grace to the mystical scenes because I understand that VFX and CGI budgets are nothing to sneeze at nowadays, but I still think that an alternative could’ve been accounted for. The generated scenes corrupt what I was already lauding as one of the most unique cinematography styles I’ve seen in recent Nollywood.
The pacing of this movie also gave me a small ick. One cannot spend over an hour building up a plot twist ending, only for the climax to be less than 10 minutes. It builds a steady pace in the beginning and then flashes right through the end, leaving more plot holes than answers and culminating into a pretty unsatisfying ending. Involving a random side story about Onome’s original motive for being in that village just to have a plausible way to make Ese log into Onome’s email and find answers there is really out of pocket, and then again, we can’t even tell if it’s real or not because the grand reveal tells us that all of Ese’s experiences have just been an illusion to lure her to the death island…
…which is an awfully convenient cop out to avoid giving us proper expositions and explanations for certain scenes.
All in all, the plot of this film builds up a lot expectation with very little payout, ultimately failing at the suspense it worked so hard to cultivate, especially with an ending like that.
Final Thoughts on Thicker Than Water
I have a lot of mixed feelings about this movie. On one hand, the on-screen chemistry, amazingly unique cinematography, and very steady plot build-up put it on the cusp of something great. And on the other, the rushed ending, plot holes, and that heaven-forsaken A.I. leave just enough errors to keep it from reaching its true potential.
I rate Thicker Than Water (2025): 2.5 out of 5.
Have you seen the Thicker Than Water? What are your thoughts on Onome’s story?
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