Blackberry Babes is PEAK Nollywood, and I kinda love it.

5 min readJan 27, 2022

Story

Blackberry Babes revolves around a group of university girls and their obsession with blackberries. It shows how much importance they have placed on the phones and the lengths they would go to have them.

Given the name and central theme of the movie, it’s pretty dated. The ‘Blackberry craze’ ended in 2013 and was very prevalent in Nigeria where the movie is set. That’s why the movie makes a lot of sense. Everyone who was anyone had a blackberry and those who didn’t have one wanted one, myself included. I begged my parents for one and when I eventually got one, I was on top of the world. I felt like I could be taken seriously.

I don’t know if this movie was intended to be social commentary and cast a light on society and our constant need to be accepted in one specific social group and have the new shiny thing, but it does a really good job. The girls in the movie are obsessed with Blackberries and wanting to be the best, so much so they resort to fraud, theft and relying on sugar dating to get what they want, to varying degrees of success.

Acting

The acting is….. not good (okay it’s pretty bad) but it’s not the worst part of the film. There are some ambitious performances from Oge Okoye, Tonto Dikeh and Annie Macaulay but it never elicits any kind of reaction except unintended laughter. This is one of those examples of the acting not being good and the writing being even worse.

You can tell that the actors give the characters personality and for that, I give them props because the characters aren’t well written. That being said, the performances get worse as the story goes on which can also be attributed to the ridiculousness of the storyline.

The accents that the actors put on are horrible. Jesus Christ, they’re bad. Something that happens both in movies and in real life is that people will put on an accent because it makes them sound more sophisticated but it doesn’t work. It sounds forced and in the context of the movie, it took me out of the film A LOT.