‘Anam’s Wake’ Review: Samson Omondi and Marima Wanjiru Anchor a Psychological Thriller That Tells More Than It Shows

Likarion Wainaina’s latest film, Anam’s Wake, is marketed as a negotiation with death, and within its opening scenes, the central negotiation underpinning much of the film takes place. It is a negotiation between a mother and an agent of death, aptly named the Negotiator, and sees the mother sacrifice her life for her daughter.

Despite this sacrifice being the fulcrum of the narrative, hours after watching the film, I still don’t understand what exactly it was meant to prevent, only that the better compromise was the daughter’s grief instead. Whether the film addresses this and buries it somewhere beneath its exposition, or simply overlooks it, the terms of its central bargain never became clear to me. And that confusion defines much of my experience with Anam’s Wake: there are key elements of this film that simply didn’t translate.

At its core, Anam’s Wake is a bottled psychological thriller that combines the psychological turmoil of a young woman thrust into the duty of ushering the dead into the afterlife with the haunting secrets of an affluent, dysfunctional family preventing their patriarch’s crossover. Deeply entrenched in the spiritual and ritualistic machinations of death as a rite of passage, and in the specialised skills of professional mourners, the transition into eternal rest is as much a delivery as it is a farewell – one that Anam’s Wake isn’t quite ready to deliver.

The film insistently hammers this in, filling much of the first act with characters doing the heavy lifting of familiarising the audience with the workings of its spiritual world. It does this so much that the characters’ continued hesitations and skepticism towards the supernatural eventually begin to feel naive. Despite the grieving family paying for a specific mourner by name, their youngest being compelled into grotesque drawings, and even after a wave of paranormal activity around them, there are still too many scenes of aloofness, offering the film yet more opportunities to remind us what is happening, how and why.

At its most cohesive, Anam’s Wake builds an unnerving atmosphere through its score and performances, with a couple of jump scares and eerie moments that allow it to earn its genre credentials. For the most part, however, the film repeatedly undercuts itself with drawn-out dialogue and exposition. The tenets of Luo spirituality, which the film partly borrows from, are there, holding up some of the film’s most compelling ideas, but the spiritual world they suggest never feels fully realised.

Perhaps my biggest gripe with the language of this film is in how it translates into ritual. Samson Omondi, playing the Negotiator, is a majestically framed celestial presence, and Wainaina makes excellent use of blocking to continually displace him within the frame. When he speaks in Luo, the authority and deific intent beneath his voice is unwavering. Yet in some of the moments when he is forced into English or Swahili, that spark disappears and he is returned to human form. Intentional or not, I couldn’t help but wonder: should we ever let our African spirits speak English?

Anam’s Wake is bogged down by a lot of talking. I cannot stress this enough. Talking that, at its best, carves out a comprehensible iconography of each character’s role and the rules upon which the film is built; but at its worst, folds much of the runtime into recurring back-and-forths between characters as they piece the movie together so the audience doesn’t have to.

There were many instances when I found myself wondering whether I was watching a play: one central room with a Swiss Army dead body; background characters monologuing their biographies one by one before standing aside like props on a stage; and, for what feels like an hour, two characters engaged in a spirited back-and-forth about the nature of their reality and their place among changing times.

As a play, I should say, the performances would be outstanding, particularly the Negotiator played with great depth by Omondi, as a transient being lost in duty and solitude, and Marima Wanjiru as the titular Anam, whose cold, restrained performance carries much of the emotional and structural soul of the story.

As a film, however, I am forced to reckon with the thought that Anam’s Wake doesn’t help Wanjiru nearly as much as she helps it.

Wanjiru’s Anam is orphaned, robbed of grief, reclusive, pursuing a career in architecture and then burdened by the calling of becoming a professional mourner. The film carries us through the process of her regaining her cry and her grief without adequately showing us what their absence has been taking away from her. She acts and speaks with so much conviction that there comes a point when Anam stops being a young woman and becomes a philosophical microphone through which the film debates its thesis.

There is a climactic scene in which Wanjiru has to perform a Gollum/Sméagol-like split monologue, and through it I couldn’t tell the difference between the voice of the girl we were just watching and a dead woman taking over her body. It’s one of the moments where the script and direction don’t give the actors enough help inhabiting this fantastical world.

I wanted to like this film, and maybe it will grow on me with time. At this moment, though, I can’t help but feel unmoved by it. It has the makings of a good psychological thriller and manages to elicit moments of genuine suspense and emotional payoff. Maybe another five minutes to see the departure of this Negotiator, whose arrival was so iconic, would have given me some closure.

Instead, Anam’s Wake is so trigger-happy in contextualising the thrills and chills of its narrative that it forgets to let enough of them take shape.

Anam’s Wake is currently showing at Prestige Cinema.

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