3 Cold Dishes review – Burna Boy produces deftly directed revenge tales with echoes of Kill Bill

<p>Asurf Oluseyi’s thriller threads a trio of stories together with Tarantinoesque swagger but choppy storytelling</p><p>Directed by self-taught film-maker Asurf Oluseyi and produced by rapper Burna Boy, this Nollywood thriller brings Tarantinoesque swagger to the Abidjan-Lagos corridor. The story is a femme-first revenge spree after the three protagonists fall foul of human traffickers, and starts as a show-offy multistrand affair with chapter intertitles that are Kill Bill yellow. While the preamble suffers from some garbled storytelling, and the staging is occasionally shaky, this cross-border caper mostly styles it out to engaging effect.</p><p>Former streetwalker Janice (Amelie Mbaye) narrates to a journalist the tale of the triple threat she took under her wing in 2002: young Ivorian Fatouma (Fat Touré), tricked into slavery by her pastor who lures her with the promise of a footballing contract in Paris; Esosa (Osas Ighodaro) from Nigeria, similarly hoodwinked by her uncle (Nollywood stalwart Wale Ojo) and smuggled to Abidjan; and Giselle (Maud Guerard), a waif prone to supernatural possession sold by her grandmother to a local chief, who kicks things off by gang-raping her. After their pimp is killed in a police raid, the trio resurface 16 years later as armed robbers with a bulging contacts list of shady enablers. They co-opt Janice into their plan: abduct the three hoodlums who hijacked them in 2002 and ladle out a big helping of the dish best served cold.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/nov/03/3-cold-dishes-review-burna-boy">Continue reading...</a>