As rom-coms continue to be dismissed as “cringe,” Nollywood’s latest romance asks whether we have simply forgotten how to feel something without apologising for it.

"You are the sugar in my tea." "You are the air that I breathe." "If you leave me yawa go dey" - roughly, if you leave me, trouble follows - Tekno warned in ‘Yawa’ - and Nigerians turned it into a flirting line. The sincerity of the original, dissolved into a joke. Say either of those sentences out loud in a room full of Nigerians and watch what happens. Someone will laugh. Someone will cringe visibly. The people who would mock it online would screenshot the words and miss the feeling underneath them entirely. We have decided, collectively and without much debate, that this kind of language is embarrassing. That saying something beautiful to someone you love - out loud, with sincerity, without a punchline - is the cultural equivalent of showing up to a party overdressed. The word for it is cringe, and it has become the default response to Nigerian romance on screen.

‍Call of My Life, directed by Dammy Twitch, produced by Blessing Uzzi, written by and starring Uzoamaka Power as Soluchi, is a film that will give the cringe crowd exactly what they came looking for. Eli, the calm, handsome TV presenter played by Andrew Bunting, does a lot of talking. He says things with his whole chest. In one scene, Soluchi is wearing his shirt. They are having the kind of conversation that exists only inside the emotional logic of a romance, and Eli tells her she is lava. He wants to be her boss. The internet would have a field day.

The film has spent its runtime building the specific world in which those words make sense. Soluchi - colourful tights, block heels, a woman who celebrates everything and apologises for nothing - is not the kind of person who would accept a muted love. She is lava. The film has shown us that. Eli calling her that is not a writer reaching for a metaphor. It is a man who has been paying attention. The cringe crowd would screenshot the words and miss the feeling underneath them entirely.

This is the problem with how Nigerians engage with romance on screen right now. The mockery is not really about quality. It is about discomfort with verbal sincerity. We have become a culture that processes emotion through deflection - through jokes, through irony, through the safety of not being the person in the room who admitted they felt something. Words of love, spoken plainly and without hedging, expose you. And nobody wants to be exposed, so we reach for mockery instead. 

‘Call of My Life’ gives Nkem Owoh and Patience Ozokwo - two of Nollywood’s most beloved legends  - the roles of Soluchi’s parents, and through them the film offers something quietly devastating: proof that an older generation understood something about love that the online generation is too defensive to access. Their love story, told in fragments, is the emotional foundation of everything Soluchi believes. She did not invent her extravagance. She inherited it. That inheritance is the most honest thing in the film.

Justin Ugonna, in his first major acting role as Ezekiel - caught in an enemies-to-lovers orbit with Beverly Osu’s Zim - is warm, funny, and fully present. A debut that earns its place in the film.

The airport scene is where the film makes its fullest argument. Soluchi, stripped of her colourful armour, in a blue gym outfit, tells Eli exactly why she has been resisting him. She is not performing. She is not hedging. She is saying the thing she means, the way she means it, in the specific language of someone who has always believed that love is worth the exposure.

The cinemas are full. Nigerians are watching romance and calling it cringe in the same breath -  consuming the feeling while performing detachment from it. ‘Call of My Life’ does not negotiate with that contradiction. It simply asks: what if you let the thing move you? What if the sugar in the tea, the air in the breath, the lava - what if all of it was just someone telling the truth about how they feel?

The film stayed earnest. We stopped allowing ourselves to express our genuine feelings with the vocabulary that reflects them. 

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