Nollywood goes to the call centre: the bright, breezy economics of 'Call of My Life'

A call centre in Lagos is an unlikely romantic engine. The work is scripted, the headsets are temperamental and the callers tend to be irate. Yet in Call of My Life, the new Nigerian romcom landing on UK screens in early July, the open-plan office is where the electricity happens — between Soluchi, the broken-hearted agent who reads from a manual she has half-memorised, and the customer on the other end of the line who somehow hears her properly. The setup is the oldest in the book: boy meets girl, girl hates boy, girl falls anyway. The setting is the new part. The setting, more than the meet-cute, is the point.

What Call of My Life demonstrates, without ever raising its voice about it, is that Nollywood's romantic-comedy lane has grown up just enough to be playful, modern and self-aware about the working lives of its heroines. It is not the most ambitious film of the year, nor does it try to be. But it is the sort of feather-light, well-built entertainment that Nigerian streaming platforms have spent the better part of a decade perfecting, and that the diaspora audience has quietly learned to budget for.

The working-girl heroine Nollywood now wants

Soluchi — "Sol" to her colleagues and to Uzoamaka Power's warm, gently comic performance — is a Lagos customer-service worker in her late twenties. She is good at her job in the quiet way that the film depicts: she de-escalates, she listens, she occasionally breaks script to be honest with a caller. The occupation is not glamorous but the film treats it with the same dignity Nollywood has lately extended to ride-hailing drivers, market traders and tech founders in its mid-budget comedies. The economic texture is in the details: shift swaps, salary complaints, the half-joking workplace rivalry over whose name appears first on the leaderboard.

Call of My Life is at its best in these workplace passages, where the writing observes more than it editorialises. Power plays the awkward comedy of a competent worker trying not to be visible — a posture painfully familiar to anyone in a globalised service economy — with a lightness that does not require the film to underline the metaphor.

A romantic-comedy grammar that travels

The plot is a stock-in-trade arc: an initial antagonism between Sol and a charming, persistent caller, a false reconciliation, a misunderstanding engineered by a workplace confidante, and a late-act decision to stop pretending. What distinguishes the film is the ease with which it arranges the moves. The first-act antagonism lands without ugliness; the mid-film flattening is deftly written rather than engineered. There is a confidence in the construction that suggests a director who has chosen the romcom frame precisely so it can be obeyed cleanly.

This is, in its modest way, the Nigerian romcom industry's clearest commercial proposition to international distributors: stories that will travel because they obey a grammar the audience already speaks, anchored in a Lagos that does not require translation. The genre is not new — Yoruba-language romcoms have circled similar themes for years — but the English-language, global-streaming-ready version has matured visibly. Call of My Life sits comfortably alongside recent titles that have shown there is a steady audience for Nigerian romantic comedy on Netflix, Prime Video and the homegrown platforms.

What the film isn't trying to do

A film this breezy risks being mistaken for a small one. Call of My Life has no interest in the social-realist register that some Nollywood features have pursued in recent years. There is no inheritance drama here, no looming migration subplot, no extended-state commentary. The Lagos the film shows is the Lagos of the open-plan office, the apartment with reliable internet, the after-work drinks that happen at a known rooftop. It is a Lagos reachable on a domestic salary.

That choice narrows the film but also gives it buoyancy. The reviewer in The Guardian picks up on this in the July review at the centre of Monexus's reading of the film, describing it as "bright and breezy" and "just right for summer", and singling out Power as "broken-hearted, lovable". The phrase matters less as a verdict than as evidence of how the film has been read in the UK press: as an accomplished, low-stakes pleasure, written with more craft than the surface implies.

Where it sits in the larger Nollywood picture

The Nigerian film industry has been on a slow rebalancing for at least a decade. Theatrical attendance has softened since the 2010s peak, the streaming platforms have absorbed a large share of new production, and the most reliably watched slate has tilted toward genres that travel well — thrillers, comedies, period romance. Call of My Life is not the kind of release that will redraw that map, but it does several useful things for the slate it sits in.

It gives its lead actress a role that lets her register both comedic timing and the quieter hurt underneath the jokes — exactly the kind of showcase part that builds a star. It places an everyday protagonist at the centre without making the everydayness feel like a thesis. And it demonstrates, again, that a Lagos-set romcom with English dialogue and a working-class heroine can find an audience both at home and in the diaspora without having to translate itself into either category.

The global streaming economics of a film like this are not incidental. The diaspora appetite for Nigerian romantic comedy — the quiet background purchase that the streaming services do not always publicise — is the structural reason a film of this scale is made and released with confidence in 2026. Call of My Life does not stake its plot on that fact. But it is the reason the plot can be as relaxed as it is.

What remains uncertain

The streaming rights trajectory for the title beyond the UK theatrical window is not spelled out in the coverage available to Monexus. Distribution in West African markets, where the romcom economics are different again, is treated as an assumption rather than a fact. And the critical conversation around the film is still narrow: one clear champion in The Guardian's review pages, with the wider UK weekend press yet to weigh in as of early July. That is the natural shape of coverage for a smaller-budget title: measured, then widening if the audience finds it.

What is already legible is the cultural point. Nollywood's romantic-comedy lane is in confident hands, and Call of My Life is the kind of film that handily demonstrates it. Bright, breezy, and just right for summer.

— Desk note: Monexus reads 'Call of My Life' through the single UK review the wire has so far produced — The Guardian's July 2026 take — and reads outward from there to the question of what the film's modest ambitions tell us about the Nollywood romcom's current commercial shape. The piece treats the review as a critical temperature reading rather than a final verdict.