It might not have the fervent awards chatter that’s followed Sandra Hüller’s current run of form, but for the London-born actress Sophie Okonedo, 2026 is already looking like a quietly spectacular comeback year. After seeing Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson’s ace coming-of-age drama Mouse earn raves at the Berlinale, and just a few months shy of her central role in J.J. Abrams’ The Great Beyond, Okonedo has come to Directors’ Fortnight with another standout turn in Clarissa, a funny and formally adventurous adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway set in modern-day Nigeria.
The movie, which is set to be released by NEON in the U.S., is directed by Arie and Chuko Esiri, twin filmmakers who broke out in 2020 with Eyimofe: This Is My Desire—another Berlinale premiere that went on to play the festival circuit before winning the siblings a joint Best Director award at the African equivalent of the Oscars. Similar to that movie, Clarissa appears to be the latest in an ongoing experiment to capture the heightened and melodramatic mood of Nollywood cinema through the lens of the arthouse—not as a means to subvert those tropes, necessarily, but more to rework and reexamine them as filmmakers like Pedro Almodóvar and Todd Haynes have done over the years with telenovelas and daytime TV.
This pacing can take a moment to get used to. Music, in particular, is only added for surges of emotional punctuation (though there are a few gorgeous establishing sequences set to original compositions by Kelsey Lu), and this notable airiness to the mise-en-scène is mirrored in the story’s locations, which are mostly large rooms or gardens in affluent houses, and the steady rhythm of the dialogue. Stick with it, however, and the setting makes for a cozy fit for the aristocratic milieu of Woolf’s text; and in the more bucolic sequences, especially, the approach proves gradually rewarding.
If you’re not familiar with the novel, the story plays out in the hours leading up to a party in the wealthy Clarissa Dalloway’s home. (Okonedo plays her in the present day, making fine use of both her signature clipped line-readings and her inherent warmth in the role.) We follow her as preparations are made over the course of the day—her dealings with the staff and her mother-in-law (veteran Nigerian actress Joke Silva) provide most of the funniest moments—while often jumping back to a formative summer from her early twenties (where she’s played in flashback by Bridgerton breakout India Amarteifio) that she spent with a group of friends: including her now-elusive friend Sally (Ayo Edebiri), a young poet named Peter (Toheeb Jimoh) who she was seeing romantically at the time, and her future husband, Richard (Ogranya).
Amongst the supporting cast, Jimoh is particularly impressive—bringing the same remarkable presence to this lovesick role that saw him steal basically every moment he was onscreen in Industry earlier this year—and Amarteifio offers plenty of evidence that she might be the next British star to emerge from that popular Netflix show. Bit by bit, the Esiris move their pieces across the board as the movie builds towards Clarissa’s climactic gathering where, inevitably, each of her old friends returns to the fray; even Peter himself, who arrives in the form of David Oyelowo and leaves Clarissa with twinkliest of twinkles in her eye, in perhaps the best of the movie’s many close-ups. The character of Septimus, a soldier suffering from PTSD from World War I in the novel, and a young man (Fortune Nwafor) traumatized from fighting Boko Haram here, is moved a little more to the sidelines.
Watching Mouse (the best movie of its kind this side of Lady Bird) back in Berlin and marveling at the actress’ performance, I was amazed that the movie hadn’t made it into the festival’s competition, let alone somewhere like Directors’ Fortnight—I fully expect it to make a bigger splash when IFC releases it later in the year. The actress broke out in the late ‘90s before earning an Oscar nod in 2005 for Hotel Rwanda, at which point she seemed to decide to focus her energies on the London stage. Then came her eagle-eyed turn as Ingrid Tearney in Slow Horses—a role that, if I had to guess, has probably done more than anything to spark this recent return. Clarissa ends with the actress in another lovely close-up, swaying to a sleepy funk classic in front of a wall of blurred-out lights. She looks every inch a movie star.
Clarissa premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival and will be released in the U.S. by NEON.