There's a very particular kind of holiday movie energy that only works if the filmmakers genuinely understand the culture they are celebrating, rather than bolting festive dressing onto a generic romance plot.
"Christmas in Lagos" clearly understands its culture. This is a film built entirely around "Detty December" — the specific, well-known Nigerian phenomenon where Lagos transforms for roughly a month into one enormous, overlapping stretch of concerts, weddings, homecomings, and street celebration — and it wears that specificity proudly, in its music, its locations, and its whole visual sensibility.
Whether the actual love stories woven through all that festive spectacle are strong enough to match the ambition of the production around them is a separate question, and it's one I found myself going back and forth on for most of the runtime.
What "Christmas in Lagos" Is Actually About
The film follows an ensemble of interconnected characters navigating love, family expectation, and heartbreak during Detty December. At the center is Fiyin, played by Teniola Aladese, who has quietly loved her best friend Elozonam for years, convinced their bond is something more than friendship — a belief that gets upended when Elo comes home for the holidays with a secret fiancée, Yagazie, whom he's only been dating for eight months. As the Christmas season unfolds around her, Fiyin has to reckon with feelings she's never voiced, torn between fighting for what she wants and finally letting go.
Running parallel to Fiyin's story is her mother Gbemi, played by Shaffy Bello, who finds herself torn between an old flame, Zach (Richard Mofe-Damijo), and a steadier, more fitting match in Toye (Wale Ojo) — giving the film a genuinely nice generational mirror, mother and daughter both wrestling with questions of who they actually want versus who might be the safer, more sensible choice. Meanwhile, London-raised Ivie, played by Rayxia Ojo, comes home to Lagos chasing the "Detty-est December possible," only to find herself unexpectedly falling for Ajani, played by Ladipoe, in a whirlwind holiday romance she wasn't remotely prepared for.
It's a structure that owes an obvious debt to "Love Actually" — multiple interlocking romantic storylines set against one specific, celebratory backdrop — and director Jade Osiberu has been fairly open about that influence, along with nods to "My Best Friend's Wedding" and "Crazy Rich Asians" in how the film balances romance, class dynamics, and family spectacle.
Jade Osiberu Stepping Into New Territory
It's worth noting that this is a genuine change of pace for director Jade Osiberu, who's built much of her recent reputation on higher-stakes, action-driven projects like "Brotherhood" and "Gangs of Lagos." "Christmas in Lagos" finds her stepping away from that action-thriller register entirely to deliver something warmer and more explicitly romantic — closer in spirit to earlier work like "Sugar Rush" and "Isoken," which she also produced through her Greoh Studios banner.
Osiberu has talked candidly about what she was trying to capture here, describing Detty December as a genuinely "magical" phenomenon — not just family togetherness in the abstract, but very specifically built around big parties, concerts, and weddings that transform the entire city's atmosphere for weeks at a time. She's also been explicit that authenticity meant going big rather than small: "Christmas films set in Lagos have been made before," she's said, "but nobody has captured the essence of what it means to come to Lagos in December. And that's because you can't do that without scale." That ambition shows up clearly in the film's concert sequences and lavish wedding set pieces, which Amazon reportedly signed off on almost immediately once she pitched the concept.
Shot for Real, in Real Lagos
One of the things I appreciated most about this film, on a pure craft level, is how committed it is to actually being filmed in Lagos, using real, recognizable locations rather than generic backlot dressing. Principal photography ran from late January through March 2024, deliberately timed to overlap with the actual Detty December period so the production could authentically capture real concerts and real weddings happening around them, rather than staging artificial versions of those events from scratch. The film uses locations like the Lekki-Ikoyi Link Bridge, Breeze Beach Club, the Civic Towers, and a historic church — a mix of contemporary and traditional Lagos landmarks that together give the film a strong sense of specific place, rather than the more placeless, anywhere-in-Nigeria feel that some lower-budget productions settle for.
The cinematography and lighting, led by Matthew Yusuf and the One House Lighting Crew, drew specific praise from multiple reviewers, particularly in how effectively close-up shots capture character emotion while still keeping Lagos itself looking vibrant and inviting in the background. One reviewer, watching as an African American viewer who grew up exposed mostly to negative or reductive Western media portrayals of Africa, spoke movingly about how meaningful it was to see a film depicting successful African business owners, strong families, and genuine visual opulence and beauty — a corrective, in their eyes, to a lifetime of much bleaker or more stereotyped representations they'd previously encountered.
The Soundtrack: A Genuine Highlight
If there's one department where "Christmas in Lagos" earns nearly universal praise, it's the music. The soundtrack was composed and produced by respected Nigerian producer Cobhams Asuquo and released through Lakeshore Records, blending Afrobeat, soul, and reimagined traditional Christmas melodies across eight tracks, featuring artists including Adekunle Gold, Waje, WurlD, Liya, ESUA, and Byno. Waje's reinterpretation of "Holy Night," performed alongside the gospel group 121SELAH, was specifically singled out as a standout reworking of a Christmas classic through a distinctly Nigerian gospel lens. The lead single, ESUA's cover of D'banj's "Fall in Love," blends traditional Nigerian instrumentation with modern pop production, and more than one reviewer called it a genuinely memorable moment in the film.
Beyond the original soundtrack, the film also weaves in a wider selection of vibrant Nigerian pop songs spanning multiple eras, and several reviewers noted just how much the music elevates the overall viewing experience — one reviewer went so far as to say the songs starting from the very first scene really "elevate the vibe" of the entire film, functioning almost as a character in their own right rather than simple background dressing. If you're the kind of viewer who pays close attention to a film's music supervision, this is genuinely one of the more carefully curated Nollywood soundtracks in recent memory.
A Cast That Mostly Gets the Balance Right
One thing "Christmas in Lagos" does noticeably well, and which several reviewers specifically praised, is avoiding a common Nollywood pitfall: overstuffing the cast with recognizable celebrities at the expense of genuine character work. This is a star-studded ensemble on paper — Richard Mofe-Damijo, Shaffy Bello, Ebele Okaro-Onyiuke, Ejike Asiegbu among the veterans — but it's balanced by a meaningful number of fresh faces making their screen debuts, including Rayxia Ojo, Shalom C. Obiago, Angel Anosike, and Ladipoe, all of whom reviewers credited with leaving a genuine impression even in imperfect moments.
Richard Mofe-Damijo, as Zach, draws specific praise for an effortless, charismatic performance, and his chemistry with Shaffy Bello's Gbemi is repeatedly described as genuinely palpable — though at least one reviewer felt that, narratively, Gbemi's eventual pairing with Wale Ojo's Toye actually makes more sense for where her character arc lands by the film's end, even if the Mofe-Damijo chemistry is more immediately electric on screen. Shaffy Bello and Teniola Aladese, playing mother and daughter, were specifically called out as a pairing audiences "didn't know they needed" — their dynamic, one reviewer noted, is genuinely compelling in a way that gives the film some of its more grounded emotional beats amid all the festive spectacle.
Musician Ayra Starr also makes what's described as her acting debut in the production, joining a roster of real Afrobeats artists making on-screen appearances that lean into the film's larger point about how inseparable music is from the Detty December experience — Osiberu herself has said plainly that a film built around this specific cultural moment would feel inauthentic without genuine Afrobeats woven throughout.
Where the Story Doesn't Quite Land
For all its visual and musical strengths, "Christmas in Lagos" runs into a genuine, recurring problem: several reviewers felt the central romantic plot — Fiyin's unrequited feelings for her best friend Elo — leans on one of the most tired tropes in the romantic comedy genre, and doesn't do quite enough with it to feel fresh. One reviewer put this bluntly, calling it a "very cliche 'I love my best friend' trope" and saying the film would have been stronger without leaning on it as its central hook. That same reviewer felt the side characters and their subplots were considerably more engaging than the main love triangle, which is a fairly telling criticism for an ensemble film — when your background characters consistently outshine your headline romance, that's worth taking seriously.
There's also a fair critique around plausibility in Fiyin's specific arc — one reviewer found it "amusing, if a bit far-fetched" that Fiyin genuinely believed Elo might propose to her, given that the two of them had never actually been in a romantic relationship to begin with. That's the kind of logic gap that can be forgiven in a lighter, frothier rom-com, but a few reviewers felt it symptomatic of a broader issue: the film doesn't always put in the connective narrative work needed to make you fully invest in why these particular characters feel what they feel, relative to how polished everything around them looks.
A related, sharper criticism came from at least one reviewer who felt the storylines skew heavily toward "IJGBs" — a colloquial Nigerian term for members of the diaspora who've "just got back" for the holidays — and their considerably wealthier families, giving the film's central concerns a narrower, more privileged frame than it perhaps needed. That reviewer still praised the acting and the costuming enthusiastically, but felt the film didn't put enough effort into making audiences outside that specific socioeconomic experience feel equally connected to the characters' struggles.
Subtitles were also flagged as a genuine, recurring annoyance by at least one reviewer, who noted persistent errors throughout the Prime Video release — a familiar complaint across Nollywood streaming releases more broadly, and one that isn't unique to this film, but is worth mentioning since it did detract from at least some viewers' experience.
A Behind-the-Scenes Scare Worth Knowing About
There's a genuinely tense bit of real-world context surrounding this production that's easy to miss if you only look at the finished film: news of Amazon's decision to pull back its streaming operations across Africa broke just two weeks before "Christmas in Lagos" began principal photography. Osiberu has spoken candidly about how anxious that period was, not knowing whether the project would end up as collateral damage from that broader corporate decision. To her evident relief, Amazon ultimately honored its existing commitment and saw the film through to completion and release — but it's a genuinely precarious piece of behind-the-scenes history for a film this polished and expensive-looking to have survived.
Osiberu has remained notably optimistic about Nollywood's resilience more broadly despite that scare, describing the industry as having weathered "all sorts of seasons" over the years without ever fully stopping its growth — a fairly confident stance given how close this particular project came to being caught in exactly that kind of corporate retrenchment.
Recognition and Reception
"Christmas in Lagos" premiered at IMAX Lekki Cinema in Lagos as part of a "Share the Good" campaign sponsored by Knorr, before being distributed theatrically and on Prime Video by Amazon MGM Studios starting December 20, 2024. Critical reception was genuinely mixed rather than uniformly glowing — some reviewers were thoroughly charmed by the film's warmth, visuals, and music, while others felt the central romance underdelivered relative to everything surrounding it. The film picked up six nominations at the Africa Magic Viewers' Choice Awards and won one, for Best Costume Design — a fitting recognition given how consistently reviewers praised the film's wardrobe, hair, and makeup work as some of its strongest technical elements.
Is It Actually a Christmas Movie, Though?
One detail that stuck with me from user reactions is how many viewers said they'd happily rewatch this outside the holiday season entirely — one reviewer specifically noted that despite being marketed as a Christmas film, they planned to revisit it throughout the year, largely because the music, visuals, and general "vibe" of the film hold up as an enjoyable watch independent of its seasonal framing. That's a genuinely interesting quality for a holiday movie to have. A lot of Christmas films live or die entirely on seasonal nostalgia and lose most of their appeal outside of December. "Christmas in Lagos" seems to have enough going for it beyond the holiday dressing — the music specifically — that it functions reasonably well as a rewatch any time of year, even if the "Detty December" framing is baked into its marketing and title.
Final Verdict
"Christmas in Lagos" is a genuinely gorgeous, well-produced ensemble romantic comedy that captures something specific and culturally real about how a huge number of Nigerians — at home and in the diaspora — actually experience the holiday season in Lagos. The music is a legitimate highlight, the production design and costuming are excellent enough to have earned formal recognition, and the location work gives the film a sense of real, lived-in place that a lot of glossier romantic comedies don't bother to build.
Where it falls short is in its central romantic engine, which leans on a well-worn trope without doing quite enough narrative work to make it feel fresh, and in a broader tendency to focus its emotional stakes on a fairly narrow, privileged slice of Lagos life. If you go in expecting a beautifully shot, well-scored, warmly acted ensemble piece rather than a tightly plotted or especially surprising one, you'll likely have a genuinely good time with it — just don't expect the central love story to be the strongest thing on screen.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 — a visually stunning, beautifully scored holiday ensemble film with real cultural specificity and charm, undercut by a central romance that leans too heavily on a familiar trope without fully earning it.
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