TIFF 2026: “CLARISSA” GIVES VIRGINIA WOOLF’S “MRS. DALLOWAY” A LUSH LAGOS REMIX

Arie and Chuko Esiri’s Clarissa is a modern Nigerian reimagining of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, but you don’t need to have read a single page of Woolf to understand what’s happening here. The film follows Clarissa (Sophie Okonedo, giving us a woman who has absolutely mastered the art of appearing fine), a wealthy Lagos society wife, over the course of one day as she prepares to host a party at the home she shares with her husband, Richard. There are flowers to arrange, staff to direct, guests to worry about and the usual small domestic irritations that become enormous when you’re already one inconvenience away from losing it. Hosting: famously relaxing. But the party is mostly an excuse. Clarissa’s real problem is that the past has suddenly started RSVP-ing.

Moving Woolf’s story from London to Lagos gives it a whole new social world to play in. The Esiris drop Clarissa into a world of money, manners, family expectations and the particular social exhaustion of knowing that everybody knows everybody—or at least knows enough to have an opinion. Lagos gives the story its own rhythm and texture, one that feels glamorous without becoming glossy. Beautiful homes, gorgeous clothes, crowded rooms and very expensive-looking people make Clarissa lovely to look at, but there’s a realness to the world around them too. The world outside Clarissa’s beautiful home is never far away. Politics, the military and the frustrations of simply getting from one place to another slip naturally into conversation, making Lagos feel lived in rather than dressed up for the camera.

Okonedo's Clarissa is warm, gracious, beautifully dressed and so practiced at keeping everything moving that you can almost miss how unhappy she is. Almost. The sadness hangs around the edges instead: in a look held a beat too long, a smile that doesn’t quite make it all the way there, the exhaustion of a woman who has spent decades being lovely company. Clarissa is surrounded by people who know her, love her, envy her and admire her, which turns out not to be the same thing as being seen.

Then two people from her youth reappear. Peter (David Oyelowo), an old friend she once had feelings for, is back in town, and so is Sally (Nikki Amuka-Bird), whose relationship with Clarissa carries a much harder-to-name charge. The film moves between present-day Clarissa and the young woman she was decades earlier, when all of her possible futures were still sitting there waiting to be chosen.

The younger Clarissa (played by India Amarteifio in flashbacks) has love for Peter, but it’s Sally (Ayo Edebiri doing a pretty good English accent) who complicates things. Their intimacy feels more dangerous precisely because Clarissa doesn’t seem to have easy language for it. Richard offers a future she can recognize.

And thankfully, none of these people arrive twenty years later as proof that Clarissa simply picked the wrong door. Peter, in particular, is still stylish, refined and dapper enough to make revisiting the past seem like a very reasonable idea. He’s also going through a divorce and clearly not in the most emotionally stable chapter of his life. Sally has lived an entire life of her own. Time hasn’t necessarily made the roads Clarissa didn’t take look worse; it has just made them real. The alternate version of your life gets a lot more complicated once the people in it have had twenty years to acquire baggage.

That melancholy could make Clarissa unbearably heavy, but it never really settles into gloom. There’s humor here. There’s sensuality. There are friendships that feel genuinely lived in and a large ensemble that gives Clarissa’s world the satisfying sense that everybody had a life before they walked into her frame and will continue having one after they leave it. Even the party feels less like a plot destination than a collision point for years of affection, resentment, curiosity and unfinished business.

There’s also a parallel story involving a soldier whose life has been shaped by trauma and political violence. It gives the movie a harsher register outside Clarissa’s wealthy social bubble, though that thread never sits quite as naturally beside the central relationships. Whenever Clarissa wanders away from its heroine for too long, you can feel the pull back toward her.

For all its melancholy, Clarissa never feels like two hours of somebody staring wistfully out of an expensive window. There’s too much desire in it for that. Too much pleasure, beauty, attraction and life still happening around Clarissa while she’s busy wondering about the life that already happened.

Maybe that’s why the Woolf transplant lands so beautifully. London becomes Lagos, but that terrible little human habit survives the trip just fine: getting exactly where you were going and suddenly wondering about all the places you didn’t go.

Clarissa doesn’t ask whether you would go back and make a different choice. That would almost be easier. It asks the much more dangerous question: if the person you used to be could see your life now, would she recognize it as hers?