Jack’enneth Opukeme has a type when it comes to writing female characters. Across Adire, Farmer’s Bride, and now Aba Blues, he keeps returning to women who want more than society expects, love too messily, and refuse to fit the usual roles Nollywood hands its female leads.

Aba Blues is a romantic film set in 1989. But beneath the love triangle, the film is really about desire, memory, and the impossible choices people make when the past refuses to stay in the past.

At the centre is Amara, played by Angel Anosike in her first leading role. She is happily married to Uzor until Dirim, the man she once loved, returns to Aba after years away. What follows could easily have become a familiar story about infidelity or temptation. Instead, Opukeme is interested in something more difficult. He asks what happens when a woman genuinely loves the life she has built while still grieving the one she never got to live.

If you’ve seen Opukeme’s earlier films, that fascination won’t come as a surprise.

In Adire, his heroine refused to be boxed in by the expectations of marriage, making choices that served her rather than everyone around her. In Farmer’s Bride, another woman rejected a life chosen for her in pursuit of a love she feels is true. Neither film rushed to judge its female lead, and Aba Blues continues that pattern.

Amara isn’t written as a woman caught between a good man and a bad one. She loves her husband, but she also carries feelings for Dirim. The film doesn’t force Amara’s emotions into neat boxes or reduce them to moral lessons. The film lets her feel both without shame, and that’s what makes her character feel real and relatable.

Angel Anosike rises to the challenge. There is something quietly heartbreaking about her performance. You can see Amara trying to hold herself together even as old feelings begin to crack open a life she thought was settled. Even when the screenplay occasionally asks her to jump emotionally before the story has fully earned it, Anosike keeps the character believable. She gives Amara enough vulnerability and self-awareness that you understand her, even when you don’t agree with her.

What stands out just as much is the way the women interact with one another. They talk about work. They worry about money. They discuss family, responsibility, and the compromises that come with growing older. Men are part of those conversations, but they are rarely the centre of them. It’s refreshing to have this kind of female relationship in contrast to mainstream Nollywood, where female relationships too often exist only to fuel rivalry. Here, friendship is allowed to be warm, complicated, frustrating, and deeply familiar.

Ironically, the men don’t receive the same attention. Dirim and Uzor aren’t written like real people with their own inner lives. One represents safety; the other represents the love she lost. They exist mainly to give her something to choose between, not to be understood on their own. Because the film spends so much time exploring Amara’s inner life, both men remain emotionally underdeveloped. It’s one of the film’s biggest weaknesses, especially since the central conflict depends so heavily on them.

The title also promises more of Aba than the film ultimately delivers. The city appears often enough, with its streets and busy markets providing texture, but it rarely feels essential to the story. You could move much of the plot elsewhere, and it won’t change very much. Some of the dialogue doesn’t help either. Now and then, characters speak in ways that sound written rather than lived, making a few emotional moments feel less natural than they should.

Still, those flaws never completely overshadow what Opukeme achieves. Three films in, and it is clear that Opukeme has a pattern. He keeps returning to women who refuse to fit neatly into the roles society expects of them. They make questionable decisions. They carry conflicting emotions. They want things they probably shouldn’t. Most importantly, the films never punish them simply for being complicated. That has quietly become Opukeme’s signature.

The men in Aba Blues may not be as fully realised as the women, and the film doesn’t always make the most of its setting, but Amara lingers long after the credits roll. She isn’t a symbol or a cautionary tale. She’s simply a woman trying to make sense of two lives she wishes she could live at once.