To Adaego With Love Review: A Post-War Romance That Plays It Too Safe

Is To Adaego With Love good?

It’s a mixed bag — well-acted and handsomely mounted, but critics have consistently pushed back on how it handles its own history. Chisom Agoawuike and Adam Garba bring real conviction to Adaego and Major Bala, and the film picked up Best Feature Film and Best Screenplay at AFRIFF 2025, a genuine vote of confidence from within the industry. But multiple reviews have flagged the same issue: a story about post-civil-war reconciliation between an Igbo schoolteacher and a Northern officer that ultimately treats reconciliation as something that happens through romance alone, without reckoning with the deeper grievances the war left behind.

What is To Adaego With Love about?

Set in 1975 Enugu, it follows a schoolteacher named Adaego who falls for a Northern army officer stationed in her town, just years after Nigeria’s civil war tore the country’s communities apart. Their relationship draws immediate resistance from both families and their wider communities, still raw from the conflict, and the film uses their romance as a lens for a nation trying to figure out what reconciliation actually looks like. It’s an ambitious premise — using a love story to carry the weight of national healing — and the film’s best scenes are the quiet ones between its two leads.

Should you watch To Adaego With Love?

If you’re interested in Nollywood’s growing appetite for historical drama, it’s worth seeing, but go in with tempered expectations about how deeply it engages its subject. The performances, particularly from Bob-Manuel Udokwu and the late Onyeka Onwenu in one of her final roles, are reasons enough to watch. But if you’re hoping for a clear-eyed reckoning with the civil war’s legacy, several critics have noted the film pulls its punches in the third act, leaning on melodrama rather than confronting the “real evils” it gestures toward earlier on.

How does it compare to other Nigerian civil-war dramas?

It’s more polished technically than many Nollywood historical productions, but less willing to sit with discomfort than the genre’s strongest entries. Where the best films about the Nigerian civil war force audiences to confront its human cost without easy resolution, To Adaego With Love ultimately prioritizes its central romance’s happy trajectory over historical honesty. It’s a handsome, well-intentioned production — just one that critics have suggested needed to trust its audience with a harder truth.