In an industry often accused of chasing spectacle over soul, Call of My Life arrives like a perfectly timed phone call you didn’t know you needed to answer. The romantic drama, written by and starring Uzoamaka Power as Soluchi—a call centre agent nursing a broken heart while fielding customer complaints—has done something far rarer than opening big. It has stayed big. With a cumulative gross of ₦498.4 million and counting as of its fourth weekend, the film is not merely performing; it is enduring. And in the fickle economy of Nigerian cinema, endurance is the only metric that truly matters.
The numbers tell a story of their own. After dethroning the Michael Jackson biopic Michael with a ₦76.9 million opening, the film has posted week after week of steady holds: ₦128.1 million by day seven, ₦303.4 million by day fourteen, ₦434.2 million by day twenty-one. Its fourth weekend added another ₦63.7 million, pushing it within striking distance of the ₦500 million mark. Industry projections now suggest a finish somewhere between ₦600–700 million—a figure that would place it among the most commercially successful Nollywood romances of the decade.
But this is not a story about numbers alone. It is a story about what happens when a film trusts its audience to care about something as unfashionable as emotional honesty.
The Director Who Listens
Dammy Twitch makes his feature debut here, stepping out from behind the camera of some of Afrobeats’ most visually arresting music videos—Burna Boy’s firestorms, Davido’s glossy extravaganzas—and into the quieter, messier terrain of human connection. One might expect whiplash. Instead, Twitch demonstrates the rare discipline of a visual stylist who knows when to simply hold the frame and let his actors breathe.
The film follows Soluchi through the architecture of modern Lagos: fluorescent call centre floors, cramped family parlors, the particular humiliation of running into an ex at a wedding. When her professional line connects her to Eli (Andrew Yaw Bunting), a Ghanaian news anchor whose voice carries the smooth authority of someone accustomed to being heard, the screenplay resists the temptation to rush toward catharsis. Their courtship unfolds in increments—missed calls, hesitant disclosures, the gradual lowering of guards. It is the kind of pacing that demands patience from an audience, and the box office returns suggest that audience was hungry for exactly this.
A Cast Built on Texture
Power anchors the film with a performance that locates the specific comedy of heartbreak: the way grief makes you simultaneously pathetic and brave. Her Soluchi is not a manic pixie dream girl or a tragic victim but a woman of appetites and contradictions, prone to oversharing with strangers and under-sharing with the people who love her most. Opposite her, Bunting brings a Ghanaian elegance that reads as both aspirational and approachable—the kind of romantic lead who looks equally convincing in a newsroom blazer or negotiating Lagos traffic.
The supporting ensemble operates with similar specificity. Beverly Osu delivers a turn as Soluchi’s best friend that sidesteps the genre’s usual wisecracking sidekick tropes in favor of something wearier and more true. Nkem Owoh and Patience Ozokwor, legends of the screen, appear in roles that honor their stature without leaning on nostalgia. Even Broda Shaggi, known primarily for comic bombast, finds notes of melancholy beneath the humor. It is a film that understands every character carries their own private heartbreak, even in the margins.
The Sound of Longing
The musical contributions of Johnny Drille and Cobhams Asuquo deserve particular mention. Rather than functioning as mere soundtrack padding, their compositions thread through the narrative like additional dialogue—Drille’s falsetto arriving at moments of vulnerability, Asuquo’s production lending Lagos itself a sonic identity that feels both contemporary and timeless. The score does not tell you how to feel; it simply makes feeling possible.
What This Means for Nollywood
Call of My Life arrives at a pivotal moment for Nigerian cinema. The industry has spent years chasing the blockbuster template—star-studded casts, holiday release windows, broad comedy designed for multiplex crowds. This film succeeds by doing the opposite. It is intimate where others are loud, specific where others are generic, willing to risk the possibility that audiences might actually want to see themselves reflected with complexity on screen.
Its commercial trajectory validates a hypothesis that studio executives have been reluctant to test: that character-driven stories, released outside the traditional December corridor, can find and sustain an audience. That a film about a woman answering phones and slowly learning to trust again can outgross action spectacles and biopics. That Nollywood’s future may depend less on imported formulas than on the peculiar, particular stories only it can tell.
The ₦600 million threshold is now less prediction than inevitability. Whether it climbs to ₦700 million or beyond depends on the vagaries of June release schedules and word-of-mouth momentum. But the film has already achieved something more valuable than any single gross. It has proven that there is a market for intelligence, for restraint, for romance that understands love is less about grand gestures than about the courage to pick up the phone and say something true.
In a season of noise, Call of My Life is the conversation worth having.
