Talk to Likarion Wainaina long enough and he might just sell you a story about a filmmaker who summons the devil from the abyss in a night of inspired writing. Or a sci-fi about a spaceship that crashes in a Kenyan village. Wainaina is so full of stories bursting from the seams of his restless brain – some fully formed, others still taking shape – that every now and then he shares them freely with the world on Instagram.
I wonder how this all started, at what point in his life he decided that his followers needed to hear his innermost creative thoughts.
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“I read somewhere, or maybe someone said it to me, ‘Don’t die with your dreams,’” he tells me.
Are you not afraid of someone stealing your concepts and executing them?, I ask but Wainaina doesn’t seem particularly concerned; some might even call him crazy. He’s the kind of artist who believes ideas are abundant and that no one should wait for the perfect moment to share them.
“A lot of people are always afraid to share their stories because they feel like that’s the only story they’ll ever have. That someone will take it and run away with it,” Wainaina says. “I can never run out of ideas as long as I’m alive because ideas come from everyday living.”
The habit began in 2024 while Wainaina was writing Anam’s Wake, his latest project. As the film took shape, so too did an unexpected ritual: sharing on Instagram the stories he believed were too expensive to make, at least not in the way he imagined them.
Anam’s Wake, a Kenyan psychological thriller, explores grief, memory and the lingering consequences of loss through a professional mourner trained to summon death and negotiate the passage of souls.
Wainaina’s elevator pitch leans further into the film’s macabre premise. “Imagine that when someone dies, death actually shows up and you have to justify this person’s soul crossing over to the other side. So you hire a professional to do it for you. But then you realise death isn’t interested in the person who died, but the professional you hired, and now you’re stuck in the middle.”
In Anam’s Wake, death isn’t a metaphor, it’s a character, and in a way, it’s a chance for Wainaina to tackle the taboo nature of death in most African cultures where “death is rarely solidified completely and so we tend to tiptoe around it” as he puts it.
“Most of the time in the African culture, talks about death and the afterlife are always very vague but when you look at other cultures, there’s always a personification of death,” he says. “Here, we don’t like talking about death or dealing with it. And that’s why I decided that we needed a conduit to finally say ‘here is death and you have no other option but to face it directly.’”
According to Wainaina, if, as Africans, we’re able to stare death in the face and interact with it, then we can finally have a being to channel our anger and grief to.
Hardly the kind of conversation you expect to be having at noon when you’re barely past your first coffee at Artcaffé, but like I said, Wainaina will sell you the craziest story, and you’ll wonder why it hasn’t been made yet.
When I first heard about Anam’s Wake in February, Wainaina was positioning it as a psychological horror rather than the psychological thriller it has since become. Having tracked the project ever since, it’s one of the first questions I ask him.
He laughs, as if he was almost expecting it. His answer is as simple as they come. According to him, labelling the film a “horror” would have boxed it into a corner and alienated the audience he wanted to reach. “You aren’t really trying to scare anyone, and whenever you have those labels of a generic genre, it comes with a bias,” he says.
The same thing happened with Subterranea – his 2024 Showmax series that stands as Kenya’s first-ever sci-fi series. “The moment we announced Subterranea as sci-fi, everyone had their own comparisons. Is it Star Wars? Is it Terminator?” Wainaina says. He didn’t want Anam’s Wake to meet the same fate, and repositioning it became necessary.
“We knew that if we categorised it as a normal horror, it would be unfairly compared to other projects,” he says.
The editing process for the horror version was also a revelation for Wainaina. “I realised that in trying to push the scares, I was losing the emotional journey of the film because I was afraid of making a slow film,” he says. “In trying to add pace and make it more horror and graphic, I realised I was ruining the movie. I decided I’d rather make a slow-burn thriller. So there are no major VFX or jump scares.”
For a filmmaker who’s constantly wrestling with ideas, it was only a matter of time before Wainaina made death his muse. Anam’s Wake, however, wasn’t born out of a fascination with death but rather with the process of grief itself – specifically his own – although “fascination” probably isn’t the word he’d use.
“In 2024, I had lost six people by April, including my own grandmother,” he says. Beyond attending funeral after funeral as a matter of routine, Wainaina was grappling with questions about his own grief and whether he was really honouring the dead or “just going through the motions.”
“I had to ask myself, ‘am I being honest when I attend these funerals?’ Because when I lose someone, I go numb. I’m still in this stage of processing it all but I have to attend all these ceremonies, the wake and the funeral,” he explains, describing it as an almost dishonest feeling.
And while everyone around him was calling him strong for not shedding a tear, inside, Wainaina feared what was still to come. “I was scared that if all the grief finally hits me later, I wouldn’t be able to handle it.”
And so he did what every artist does when faced with a feeling far too heavy to process all at once. He put it down on paper. “I was like, let me try and pen down my thoughts and questions and try to deal with it all.”
It was in that space, trying to make sense of a grief that had yet to arrive, that Anam’s Wake was born, though not as one film but two.
“The first one, Anam, wasn’t a supernatural film. It was like a detective, Nancy Drew-type of film,” Wainaina explains. “She’s a mourner who thinks she saw the body move and now she has to investigate. This was about grief.”
His second story, Kifo Sukari, imagined death as an accountant. “He goes to this wealthy home and does the books, balancing the souls.”
Both ideas, Wainaina says, fell apart because they were two thoughts colliding. It was also because no one was challenging the two characters – Anam and Death – in either world. “They were just going through life,” he says. “I decided, what if I brought the lead from Anam and the one from Kifo Sukari together and let them question one another in one movie? That’s how Anam’s Wake came together, basically my thoughts on grief and death fighting against each other.”
To shape this new idea, Wainaina’s research began, rather unintentionally, while on the set of a local telenovela. “We were filming in someone’s house where a coffin was a prop. The art department carried the coffin through the entire estate to the location without covering it.”
This, he says, caused so much confusion in the neighbourhood that the homeowner had to call after he began receiving condolence messages. “He said he couldn’t allow a coffin to enter his house,” Wainaina remembers.
Puzzled, Wainaina asked why. The answer: his traditions and culture didn’t allow such a thing.
His interest piqued, Wainaina began speaking to more people to better understand Luo culture. “The moment I learnt about Luo culture, I started researching professional mourners and watched a lot of videos about it,” he says. “Anam’s Wake doesn’t even capture a quarter of what I saw.” Had it done so, he says, people might have questioned whether the film was even real. “I had to tone it down.”
In Kenya, professional mourners are most commonly associated with Luo and Luhya communities in the country’s western region. But this wasn’t the only place Wainaina drew inspiration from.
Even in the early stages of pitching Anam’s Wake, Wainaina was adamant about positioning it not just as a Kenyan film but as an African one. “If we called it a Kenyan film, it means that the story is about Kenyan culture, but we’ve also borrowed from so many other African cultures,” he says. “I borrowed from West African mythology of Mami Wata, from Angolan culture and also from vampirism. All of us have so many different concepts about death and how we treat death.”
Wainaina also dug into books, some of which he describes as “too scary to finish.” One in particular – Of Water and the Spirit, which his producer Wanjiru Njoroge gave him – he couldn’t bring himself to read beyond the first two chapters.
“It’s a book about West African culture and death, and it was too dark. If I had made that version, Anam’s Wake would have been labelled witchcraft. If we’d gone too hard into the subject matter, I think we’d have alienated people rather than welcomed them,” he says.
If Supa Modo established Wainaina as a filmmaker drawn to emotional storytelling and the boundless possibilities of imagination, and Subterranea showcased his appetite for ambitious genre filmmaking, then Anam’s Wake brings those instincts together in his most personal film yet. I ask Wainaina whether there’s a thread connecting the three projects: his tendency to place ordinary Kenyans in extraordinary situations.
“It’s my upbringing, the kinds of movies I had access to,” Wainaina says, singling out M. Night Shylaman as one of his inspirations. “I really love his movie Signs; it shook me to the core. And I understood why when I became a filmmaker – putting ordinary people in extraordinary situations. I think that’s the framework of good storytelling, that we always put ourselves in grand situations. So that became my style because that’s how I live.”
Genre filmmaking is also at the core of Wainaina’s work, and he has no plans of slowing down. “I really want to do more genre pieces,” he says, revealing that he’s already developing the projects he hopes will follow Anam’s Wake. “My dream is to do five films a year. Anam’s Wake is the first.” Next is what he describes as a “full-on horror,” a sci-fi project starring Bruce Makau, which has already been cast. “The script for this one is complete, and we’re currently looking for financing.”
Beyond that, Wainaina’s focus has shifted towards creating projects with more specific world building. “That’s something I don’t see a lot of in Kenya,” he says. “A lot of us, myself included – at least in the past – do a lot of generic stuff. Our cinematography and world-building are really not specific. And if you see what makes other filmmakers in other countries really prosper, it’s the specificity of their world and identity.”
His appreciation for world-building was reignited by Subterranea, which follows eight participants in a psychological experiment gone wrong. Set primarily in an underground bunker, Wainaina and his team built a self-contained world where a diverse group of characters, each battling their own demons, are identified only by colours.
“The moment we did Subterranea and were given room to just create, I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, I really miss doing this – where we say, “This character is Yellow, so let’s create a yellow world for her,’” he says.
Wainaina is writing more than ever, not just as a hobby that ends on Instagram but as a deliberate effort to build a portfolio of genre work and encourage other filmmakers to do the same. “I’ve been posting short stories on my website that I’m planning on compiling into a sci-fi anthology book.”
Anam’s Wake is also Wainaina’s first feature as a solo writer. “For me, that’s growth,” he says. “Even the next four projects that are coming, I’ve written by myself.”
I wonder, as the interview draws to a close, if Anam’s Wake has provided the answers Wainaina has been searching for about death and grief.
“It made me question death even more,” he says. “It left me confused because this film doesn’t exist to answer any questions, but to raise them. It doesn’t offer any definitive answers about death or the afterlife. Its purpose is to show you that this is how grief is processed and that you’re not alone.”
But who knows? Perhaps Wainaina will one day find the answers he’s looking for. As he reveals, there is so much possibility for expanding the world of Anam’s Wake into a sequel and even a third film.
Anam’s Wake premiered at Prestige Cinema on 31 July. Additional screenings take place on 1 and 2 August.
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