Much like Plan B and Boda Love, the pairing of a Kenyan with a foreign love interest has become the go-to launchpad for a growing number of budget-friendly romcoms shot in Kenya. Kenyan-Nigerian feature East West Love, as the title suggests, is a standard entry in this mould, fusing the worlds of Lagos and Mombasa into a compact eighty-five-minute film that presents itself as an intimately cohesive love story, but one that never fully merges its two worlds beyond their most rudimentary parts.
Tito, still nursing the wounds of heartbreak in Lagos, escapes to Mombasa with her best friend, where she meets Juma. A budding romance develops as the two explore the city’s beauty and find solace in each other. Giving two very beautiful characters the space and breath of the coastal atmosphere to slowly construct a simplistic meet-cute through the ebbs and flows of familiar romantic tropes, the film has little interest in reaching further than the tried-and-tested formula, and much within its runtime suggests it never felt the need to.
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Intentionally framed around the streets of Mombasa, the city emerges as a co-lead in the story, serving both as a scenic escape for the tourist mesmerised by its beauty and as a symbol of rootedness for the local man intent on preserving it. With the couple largely spared any real complications in the progression of their relationship, the film creates ample room to linger around its leads as they drift through the city without ever fully committing to them as individuals.
Broken down into its components, however, there is much within both the performances and the narrative that holds the film back. Playing out scene by scene with choreographed precision, East West Love builds very little in the way of surprise or anticipation. Every beat arrives exactly as expected and, while that predictability is part of the appeal of this kind of film, so much depth and complexity are sacrificed for the familiar and safe that the film begins to feel less like comfort and more like limitation.
For a film so dependent on the chemistry and rapport of its two leads, Brian Abajah and Sunshine Rosman are a hit-and-miss throughout. Rosman carries a grace and poise reminiscent of Zazie Beetz as she wears Mombasa’s light beautifully, yet there are moments where who the character claims to be feels very different from who the film presents her as. Near the end, for instance, when her ex publicly humiliates her new love interest, she does little to defend him because she doesn’t want to cause a scene. If only all those films that ended with someone barging through an airport were as considerate.
Abajah, meanwhile, charming as he reliably is, at times delivers a performance too stiff to fill the spaces around the couple’s dynamic. Both actors are undeniably picturesque on camera, and the coastal scenery lends their performances an additional layer of atmosphere, but the script often relies on quiet scaffolding to disguise the moments where the two seem emotionally out of sync. East West Love struggles to access the vulnerability and exposed pain at the heart of these characters and, without it, the possibility of a truly resonant romantic ache remains elusive.
The deeper problem is one of urgency, or the absence of it. These are two people from vastly different lives across the continent who slip into each other’s worlds almost too perfectly, so seamlessly that it borders on parody. Despite beginning with the premise of a short vacation, East West Love attempts to build emotional conflict around the couple’s commitment to each other without ever seriously asking what happens when the vacation ends. That disregard for consequence weakens much of the film’s emotional pull, making it increasingly difficult to care when neither character questions the nature or future of their pan-African romance.
Lagos and Mombasa are framed as polar opposites: one a busy city hampered by traffic, the other a serene cultural dreamscape. Yet the film never explores what those opposites are actually in tension with. Even the love triangle at the centre of the story is reduced to a simplistic East African versus West African stand-off. In one of the film’s most revealing moments, a character remarks that people in Lagos do not kiss in hotel hallways, so the rebuttal is, naturally, that East Africans do. Do we?
The film never quite does enough to endear its characters as individuals rooted in specific places, and cultures. As a result, the declarations of love feel impersonal, the heartbreaks blunt, and the apologies that follow them vapid. There is a genuinely interesting cross-continental story buried somewhere inside East West Love. This is not quite that film. But it is, at the very least, a pretty place to wait for it.
East West Love had its world premiere as the opening film at the NollywoodWeek Film Festival 2026 in Paris.
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