Review: Uche Montana's Monica Unravels Deep Wounds We Should Talk About More

I watched Monica two months ago.

I still haven't figured out whether I watched a family drama or a two-hour experiment in human wickedness.

Considering the full-stack layers of melancholy and sadism it anchors, I wasn't sure whether I wanted to review the movie or just sit somewhere quietly and ask, What the hell did I just watch?

With Mama Monica's (Blessing Onwukwe) overwhelmingly good performance at the centre of this family drama, the movie was set up to deny you any common sense in the sort of wickedness you will ever see.

If you have seen Wicked, this is worse.

If you know evil, you are probably getting close to understanding the thinking behind this movie.

Let me walk you through it a little.

Monica! Monica!

There is a particular kind of person everyone loves.

The one who never complains.

The one who gives up her seat, her food, her money, her opportunity.

The one who will say, “It's fine,” when it is very clearly not fine.

We call these people selfless.

Sometimes we call them good children.

Sometimes we call them responsible.

And sometimes, without realising it, we make their suffering a bizarre requirement for their goodness.

This is what makes Monica uncomfortable.

Not that Monica suffers. Nollywood has never been short of suffering.

It is that almost everyone around her eventually becomes comfortable with her suffering.

And Monica herself helps them.

The good daughter

Monica is the kind of daughter Nigerian families like to put on a pedestal.

She takes care of her siblings. She helps her mother. She gives up her own ambitions. She works. She endures. She keeps hoping.

And because she does all these things willingly, everyone gets to pretend everything is fine.

That is where the clever cruelty of the story comes in.

Nobody forces Monica; she volunteers, always.

She has convinced herself that everyone else must be okay before she is permitted to be okay.

Her annoying selflessness is admirable until you start asking what it is costing her.

Because there is a thin line between sacrifice and self-abandonment.

Monica crosses it so many times that you eventually stop asking why nobody is helping her and start asking why she cannot help herself.

This isn't an indictment of Monica.

It is one of the film's most interesting questions.

Can selflessness become a curse?

At some point, prioritising everybody else's needs stops being generosity and becomes a convenient way of avoiding your own.

Perhaps Monica isn't only sacrificing her dreams for her family.

Perhaps she has also learnt to measure her worth by how much she can endure for them.

And that is a dangerous lesson for anyone to learn.

When pain becomes normal.

There is another uncomfortable thing happening in Monica.

Pain is normalised.

Not just for Monica.

For everyone.

Her suffering becomes part of the household's routine.

She suffers, adjusts and continues.

And because she continues, everyone else continues too.

This is where the film gets darker than the usual story about family sacrifice.

Sometimes it even comes from your mother.

Mama Monica is perhaps the most disturbing character in the entire story, not because she is simply cruel, but because of how difficult it is to understand what she thinks she is protecting.

Mama Monica is a dubious and manipulative psycho. She is so evil you might think it is art, a Picasso-level kind of art.

At times, you genuinely wonder whether this woman wants Monica to succeed at all.

Why is she so determined to keep her daughter in the same place?

Why does Monica's future seem to threaten her?

Why does the daughter who gives the most receive so little tenderness in return?

The cruelty becomes more disturbing because it is selective and premeditated.

The film doesn't present a mother who hates her children.

It presents a mother whose treatment of Monica makes you question what motherhood means when love and control become indistinguishable.

Home is supposed to be where the danger ends.

In Monica, home is where some of it begins.

The politics of parenting

Parents have an enormous advantage over their children.

For some:

They get to decide what sacrifice means.

They can call deprivation character building.

They can call favouritism wisdom.

They can call control protection.

And children, especially children like Monica, are expected to trust them.

Who gets opportunities?

Who gets sacrificed?

Who gets educated?

Who gets to dream beyond the fence of their father's house?

Who is told to wait till turning 25 just to marry?

And why is it so often the child who has already proved their loyalty who gets asked to sacrifice again?

Monica's siblings do not simply benefit from her sacrifices.

They grow accustomed to them.

That distinction makes her a prisoner of her own choices, even if it is not only her fault.

And when the person doing the helping finally needs help herself, the relationship can become painfully revealing.

True love is not always true

Then there is love.

Monica is particularly cruel about the idea of romantic love.

Because love, by itself, is a remarkably weak guarantee.

People can love you and still fail you.

They can promise forever and still choose themselves.

They can see your vulnerability and exploit it.

They can tell you that they care while making decisions that prove otherwise.

This is why the betrayals in *Monica* hurt.

Monica has spent so much of her life believing that giving people everything should eventually make them give something back.

It doesn't.

There is no contract between sacrifice and reward.

You can be the best daughter in the world and still have a terrible mother.

You can love someone completely and still be abandoned by them.

You can spend years doing the right thing and still find yourself asking what all that goodness bought you.

That may be one of the film's harshest lessons.

Love does not automatically make people good.

And where are the men? Women avoid these sorts of men.

This sort of masculine deficiency should be studied.

The men in Monica's world are some of the worst people to have in your corner.

Her father and brother seem to share the same shallow understanding of responsibility.

Her father is worse than a shadow. He seems to be visible only when feeding goats or telling his wife he is sick.

A very weak, tacky and slow-to-reason man. He is the easiest definition of useless. But he is useful because he offered Monica useful advice. He was only useful when he was about to die. Slightly useful.

Her brother, Bobo, is very out of touch with reality, but he knows his way when making a baby. This guy barely makes a good decision. An ungrateful, entitled, and monotonous young man.

Monica becomes the shock absorber for a family that should have had more than one person carrying its weight.

And the women around her are not exactly helping.

This is important because the story can easily be reduced to “bad mother, suffering daughter.”

But there is a bigger question underneath the themes:

What happens when the people who should carry responsibility simply don't recognise it?

Someone always pays.

And in Monica's case, it is usually Monica.

The optimism problem

But here is the thing I found most interesting about Monica.

She never completely loses hope.

That is beautiful.

It is also frustrating.

Because optimism can be a wonderful survival mechanism.

It can also keep you in places that have already demonstrated that they will hurt you.

Monica keeps believing that things will change.

That people will change.

That sacrifice will eventually be recognised.

That love will eventually make sense.

And perhaps that is why the story works.

Because most people don't leave bad situations the moment they realise they are bad.

They leave after hoping one more time.

And then one more time.

And then one more time.

Sometimes optimism is courage.

Even if you know it is foolishness.

The real tragedy

The easiest way to watch Monica is to look at Mama Monica and say, What kind of mother does this?

But perhaps the more uncomfortable question is:

What kind of environment makes this behaviour possible?

Because Mama Monica is not operating in isolation.

There is a family structure around her.

There are expectations.

There are gender roles.

There are economic pressures.

Some children learn what they are allowed to expect.

There is Monica herself, whose goodness becomes so predictable that everybody begins to budget their lives around it.

Monica is not destroyed because she is weak.

She is nearly destroyed because everyone knows she is strong.

And strong people are often given more weight than they should have to carry.

This is not a perfect film, but that is fine. I know this is Netflix standard, by the way.

Some of its emotional beats are repeated until the point is almost impossible to miss. The timeline and character development also occasionally struggle under the weight of the story it is trying to tell.

But perhaps that is not what will stay with me.

What stays is the uncomfortable possibility that sometimes the people we praise for being selfless are not actually living fulfilling lives.

They are simply very good at disappearing.

Monica leaves us with one question:

At what point does being there for everyone else become an excuse for not being there for yourself?

Because Monica spent years proving that she could survive almost anything.

The real victory was learning that she did not have to.

Uche Montana's Monica takes off the hoodie on why you shouldn't abandon yourself, especially when no one is willing to choose you.

I love this movie. 8/10.