At this year’s AFRIFF, Kayode Kasum’s name sits in the programme more than once. He arrives with two new titles, The Good Gift and Fractured, which land in very different corners of his slate. One leans into intimate domestic drama. The other goes for a psychological corporate thriller that bends reality until it snaps.
Fractured is the outlier in a filmography that usually keeps its feet in everyday life. Corporate power, paranoia, a mind that betrays its owner; the film pushes into territory Nollywood rarely explores at this scale. The seed came from producer Tolu Babs-Onish, who brought Kasum an idea about a woman whose mind turns against her in a high-stakes office environment.
“The idea for the film came from Ms Tolu Babs-Omish,” Kasum says. “She brought it over to us and we always try to elevate ideas.” She pulled in screenwriter Dare Olaitan, whose draft, in Kasum’s words, “went bonkers”. The pages were dense, trippy, ambitious. Kasum’s own task sat on the next rung. “It was left to me as an experienced director to interpret this script and tie it in ways I think the Nigerian audience would understand.”
That balancing act sits at the heart of Fractured. Kasum wanted a thriller built on disorientation, yet rooted in a world that feels recognisable to viewers who have worked in Lagos offices, carried Nigerian expectations on their backs, processed stress in private. He speaks often about his interest in what happens when the mind becomes the enemy.
“One big reference was Shutter Island,” he says. “I enjoyed watching it, then getting to the end and realising the director had taken me on a journey I believed in the whole way. I always wanted to recreate that feeling in a Nollywood film where you think you know what is happening but you do not.” In Fractured, that ambition plays out as a slow tightening. The audience shares the lead character Tosin’s confusion instead of watching it from a safe distance. “You get to understand what it is to journey into a fractured mind,” he says. “I know anybody who watches Fractured, whether you understand where you are going or not, it will always leave a mark.”
Kasum stacks global references without apology. Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island is the north star. Christopher Nolan’s puzzle-box structure sits close behind. “I looked at Nolan’s style of storytelling,” he says, “creating a maze that comes together. There is an Inception reference because there is a part of the film where you have to convince Tosin she has to believe in something.” He rewatched Jordan Peele’s Get Out while shooting, focusing on how it frames hypnosis and builds rules inside a heightened world. “It helped in terms of why something is happening now and why it stops,” he says. “I really enjoyed making this psychological thriller.”
The film however, is not an empty exercise in endless homage to other directors. The influences filter through a Nigerian lens, through the way the country talks about trauma and mental health. Here, breakdown is often framed as a spiritual attack, an issue for prayer houses or deliverance ministries. Clinical language arrives late, if at all. Kasum does not pretend this context does not exist. He leans into it.
“Trauma in Nigeria is often spiritualised or dismissed,” he says. “I did make the decision to spiritualise it in a way Nigerians would understand.” He wants the audience to sit inside Tosin’s head, to feel her terror, to see the illness. “Living in Tosin’s head makes you understand what it is to see this is an illness,” he says. At the same time, he understands the need to speak in a familiar code. “You have to find a way to communicate with the audience in ways they would understand, and in Nigeria mental health is mostly linked to spiritualism. There are moments like that in the film but it still addresses mental illness and takes you on a journey of hope.”
He does not pitch Fractured as a public service announcement. “It was more for entertainment,” he says. He expects reflection to land later, at home, in cars, in group chats. “The audience will feel sorry for her,” he says of Tosin. “At least one thing you feel is the mental stress she is going through. People came out saying they really fucked with her mind. For the audience to know how it feels when your own mind is being messed with, I guess it is worth it.”
The idea that a film can be entertainment and still carry weight runs through Kasum’s body of work. His range has become a talking point in itself. He started not as a critic’s favourite, not as an auteur with a carefully positioned debut, but as a motion graphics designer who wanted to make features. Early on he worked at Wale Adenuga Productions, cutting television promos and saving money. It took two years to scrape enough together for his first feature, Dognapped, a family comedy about a talking dog. The film did not set the industry on fire, yet it taught him how to get a feature over the line.
Oga Bolaji followed with less noise and more feeling. The film, semi-autobiographical, picked up attention on the festival circuit and reset how people spoke about his work. The shift did not arrive in the form of a manifesto. It showed up as a stronger sense of tone and patience. The pace then accelerated. Quam’s Money, This Lady Called Life, Ponzi, Soole, Obara’m, Ajosepo; the list is long and grows each year. His output has reached a volume that would be impossible in most industries.
He does not shape this as a strategy. “I love making films,” he says. That is his answer when asked how he manages four titles a year in a system that often struggles to get one into production. The images that repeat in his work are small and specific. Dialogue that leans on everyday speech rather than punchlines. Music that carries feeling instead of decorating scenes. A fondness for certain colours and instruments. Yellow slips into the frame often. A trumpet line frequently surfaces on the soundtrack. These details signal continuity more than brand building. He talks less about voice, more about rhythm.
Kasum does not hide the fact that some projects arrive as assignments. He has studio jobs where he comes in long after the script is set, as well as films like Oga Bolaji or Obara’m where he holds the story closer. The approach, from his point of view, does not split neatly into “for hire” and “personal”. He walks into both with his own visual sense, his tempo, his curiosity. He treats directing as craft, almost as a service role, with room for his stamp. The personal finds its way in regardless. Obara’m, his 2022 musical, took shape after the loss of his father. He wanted to make a happy film about death, a family piece his grandmother would enjoy, built around the idea that music can stretch where dialogue fails. It became his most expensive film and one of his most precise.
Fractured sits in that line with The Good Gift. They are smaller, more focused pieces that echo his current concerns. The new film returns to grief and stress, this time filtered through a corporate office and an unreliable mind. The choice to go psychological reflects his interest in how far Nigerian audiences are willing to travel with him. “Our audience has learnt to expect a certain type of film,” he says. “Humour, relatable characters we see every day. This film is very Nigerian, yet it is new characters and a new genre.”
When he thinks about where Fractured should land first, he looks beyond the local multiplex. “I think global streamer,” he says. He believes the film can grow in a space where psychological thrillers already have a base. At the same time he knows it will play differently at home. He expects some viewers to embrace the shifts in tone, some to bounce off entirely. “It is new for the Nigerian audience,” he says. “It will take some getting used to but people who get it get it. You might watch Fractured and not understand it. You might watch and be confused. If you follow the story and have an open mind, the journey is worth it.”
He speaks of films as journeys often. He rarely talks about legacy. The volume of his work raises the usual questions about quality and overextension. He does not argue with those points in interviews. He keeps working instead. The pipeline functions almost like a diary. Each title holds a record of where he was at the time, emotionally or technically. Ponzi belongs to a period when he says he was “fighting the system” and trying to find himself. Obara’m captures his grief. Fractured records his fascination with unstable minds and the way Nigerian society explains them.
Kasum’s sets rely on rehearsal. He gives actors space to improvise inside a structure. He likes the energy of a first cut. He dislikes dragging projects through endless rounds of post. He keeps a close circle of performers and producers, names like Ikponmwonsa Gold and Nancy Isime show up more than once, musicians return. The repetition is practical and creative. It lets him move quickly without losing cohesion.
Looking ahead, he hints at returns to familiar ground. Another musical sits on his wish list. He talks about making more Igbo-language films, perhaps another journey story along Nigerian roads. He is open to animation if the right script appears. The goals shift with each brief that lands in his inbox. He does not frame his career as a march toward a single masterpiece. He sees it as a growing shelf.
If there is a pattern across that shelf, it lies in the way he circles back to people under pressure and to the small choices that tilt a life. In Fractured, the pressure takes the shape of a mind that cannot be trusted. The audience follows Tosin through corridors, boardrooms and visions, unsure when reality slips. Kasum asks them to stay with her even when the floor moves. The bet is simple. If he can make viewers feel the crack in her mind, if he can leave a mark that lingers after the credits, he will have done what he set out to do. Then he will go back to set. There is always another story.
