Review: At Two and a Half Hours, ‘Tides’ Stretches Its Pacing but Delivers Heart with Performance and Music

Reuben Odanga’s second feature, Tides, is a rich mix of drama and music that affirms the goodness and faith still possible in a cold world like ours. It follows Salma (Sarah Hassan) and Biko (Brian Kabugi), a musician couple struggling to survive and pay the medical bills for their daughter’s rare condition, financial pressure that eventually pushes them into selling their bodies. The film treats those choices with a poetry that strips away the gaudiness the premise might suggest; both the characters and the camera understand Salma and Biko’s predicament too well to let a judgmental view take hold.

That poetry is also where the film’s central tension lives. Tides is telenovela-coded in its DNA, one of Odanga’s strongest suits – melodrama, musical outbursts and characters who speak their feelings aloud rather than bury them. For long stretches, that register is exactly what gives the film its heart-on-its-sleeve honesty, a quality rare in a landscape of cooler, more guarded filmmaking. But melodrama has a metabolism, and this one doesn’t always regulate it. Across its two and a half hours runtime, the film’s telenovela pacing ebbs and flows unevenly: scenes of real devastation are sometimes followed by beats that indulge a feeling past the point it needs illustrating, and the film occasionally trades momentum for another wave of sentiment. There’s a tidy irony in a film called Tides moving so irregularly, but irony doesn’t excuse the drag. By the second hour, the elongated emotional beats start to test patience rather than reward it, and a firmer edit would have let the genuine gut punches land harder.

Hassan is the film’s strongest asset. As Salma, her role requires a split we’ve rarely seen her perform on screen: a woman projecting composure for her family while poverty and shame hollow her out privately. Hassan straddles that divide so finely that it’s genuinely impressive to watch. A scene late in the film, with a static shot pushing slowly in on her face as Biko paces on either side, lets her run through three or four emotions without a line of dialogue – that’s a level of emotional control her filmography hasn’t asked of her before.

Kabugi as Biko is the more surprising performance, if only because the actor’s work has largely lived on television, where roles rarely ask for this kind of range. Here, playing a callous, self-centred, pimp-adjacent boyfriend who is also visibly weak and desperate, he’s given a more complete arc than television has typically written for him. And he meets it: there’s a surety in the way he delivers a line like “You’ll always be mine” that suggests an actor settling into himself rather than performing at us. It’s the strongest evidence yet that Kabugi’s ceiling is higher than his TV résumé has let on.

The music, meanwhile, is integrated smartly rather than bolted on – Salma and Biko front a band, so the musical numbers double as plot rather than interruption, in the vein of A Star Is Born relocated from Los Angeles to Mombasa, with a gentler ending. Hassan’s singing voice is dubbed, with musician and actress Silayio providing Salma’s vocals, a choice unlikely to bother anyone not already looking for a reason to be bothered. The match is close enough that the numbers land regardless. The costuming leans into the same idea, contrasting the leads’ threadbare daily wear with the glamour of their stage looks, a neat visual shorthand for how performers code-switch when the lights come up.

Jim Bishop’s cinematography is Tides’ most consistent pleasure. It rarely announces itself, choosing to carry the emotional temperature of a scene rather than decorate it. The recurring device of marking the film’s movements with phases of the moon gives the whole thing a structure that earns the title even where the pacing doesn’t.

The stronger subplot involves Salma’s sister Brenda (Minne Kariuki), a bordello madam owed a debt by the two leads. The story refuses to hand either side the moral high ground, and the film’s two moments of violence read less as plot beats than as the visible residue of what poverty does to people under enough pressure. Less essential is the extended detour with a grieving South African widower (Dumisani Mbebe), travelling the continent and scattering his late wife’s ashes before arriving in Kenya, where he meets Salma. Mbebe plays it with genuine tenderness, but the subplot runs longer than its emotional payoff justifies and is one of the clearer places where the film could have been tightened.

For all its excess, Tides is a film that knows what it wants to make you feel and mostly earns it. It’s an ambitious, big-hearted piece of filmmaking about survival and the scars people leave on each other without meaning to, one that would hit even harder if it were shorter. As it stands, this is still a very good time at the movies, just one that occasionally overstays its welcome to get there.

Tides is currently showing in cinemas.

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