I just finished watching The Herd, and I must tell you that it is one of Nollywood’s finest offerings this year. In fact, 2025 can be defined by two stellar Nollywood projects, Kemi Adetiba’s To Kill A Monkey and Daniel Etim Effiong’s The Herd. These two productions alone have set a very high bar for quality storytelling in the industry.
It starts on a day of joy and hope. We meet Gosi (Daniel Etim Effiong), a man carrying a quiet fear about his wife Adama’s recurring cancer scare, but he tries to push that aside because his close friend Fola (Kunle Remi) is marrying Derin (Genoveva Umeh). The wedding is warm and full of laughter, the kind of celebration Nigerians throw with genuine optimism. Everyone is happy, relaxed, and ready to call it a perfect day. As the newlywed’s car heads toward the hotel after the ceremony, the mood in the car is easy and light. Then a traffic jam appears ahead, caused by what looks like herders with cattle blocking the road. At first, it feels like the usual rural-road inconvenience, nothing to worry about. But in a split second, the illusion fades. The cattle are a trap, the herders are armed men, and before anyone can make sense of it, the long line of cars is ambushed. Gosi, Fola, Derin, and several others, including a corps member, are dragged into the bush. The joy of the wedding collapses instantly. What should have been a beginning becomes a terror-filled plunge into the worst version of reality.
From there, the struggle to stay alive takes over the story. These kidnappers are not confused young men or accidental criminals. They are cold, methodical, and ruthless. The victims are shoved into fear, disorientation, and pain. A murder happens. Fola, the groom, is killed. And slowly the deeper horror unfolds as it becomes clear that this gang is connected to an organ-harvesting and body-parts market. What starts as one tragic kidnapping situation reveals itself to be part of a massive criminal enterprise. The cruelty is layered, systematic, and monstrous.
The film refuses to box this evil into a single identity. The kidnappers come from different tribes and religious backgrounds, which makes the story feel more honest. This is not a tribal narrative. The movie shows how wickedness, when left unchecked, crosses ethnic lines. Their moments of prayer, their burial rites, and their attachments to different cultural practices are all contrasted with the violence they commit. It is a sharp reminder that crime has no tribe, no singular face.
In the middle of all this, the film zooms in on Adama (Linda Ejiofor-Suleiman), who is forced to raise ransom money for her husband’s release. She faces judgmental bankers, unhelpful relatives – like her husband’s parents (portrayed with intimidating elegance by Nobert Young and Tina Mba), societal pressure, and even the complicated dynamics of caste systems like the Osu issue, which quietly influences who gets help and who is abandoned. The storytelling makes it painfully clear that class, culture, and family expectations shape the fate of victims almost as much as the kidnappers themselves.
Inside the gang, things are not stable either. Their so-called godfather demands huge cuts from ransom payments, but even he is not safe. Halil (Abba Ali Zaky) kills him in a shocking display of greed and disloyalty. That moment exposes a truth: banditry is not born out of ideology or some misguided sense of rebellion. It is a criminal economy driven by hunger for money and power.
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The emotional weight of the film is just as brutal as the physical violence. There is the grief of families (painfully portrayed by Mercy Aigbe as Derin’s mother) who do not know if their loved ones will return. There is the aching uncertainty that eats away at the spirit. There is the uncomfortable truth that communities often pretend not to see what is happening around them. What makes The Herd stand out is that its victims are not flat characters. They feel real. Their fears, regrets, hopes, and moments of courage pull you in.
There is also some hope through the police investigation led by Adam Garba. Unlike the usual caricature of police officers in Nollywood, these ones actually try. A simple call from abroad through a smartwatch triggers a chain of discoveries, including human remains hidden in a freezer close to a church and uncomfortable evidence that respected institutions are complicit in these horrors. It is a quiet warning about how evil often comes disguised as something respectable, even safe.
But the film doesn’t sit back and give us a comfortable ending. Several questions are left hanging regarding other victims, like the scale of the network, Adama’s deal with Gosi’s parents, and even how the survivors will cope after the trauma. Some threads feel rushed or underexplored, but strangely, that incompleteness mirrors our reality too closely. In Nigeria, tragedies rarely end neatly. Some families never get answers. Some wounds remain unhealed. The lack of closure feels intentional, and it forces you to sit with the discomfort long after the movie ends.
I think The Herd works so well because it uses suspense and fear to reflect what Nigeria has been living with for years. Banditry, kidnapping, organ trafficking, institutional failure, tribal bias, harmful cultural expectations, the trauma of survivors, the pain of families left behind. Nothing is exaggerated. It all feels real because it is real. The performances are a big part of why the film hits this hard. Genoveva Umeh and Daniel Etim Effiong put in brilliant work, but the cake was taken by the entire kidnap crew – Halil was likable, Anas was wicked to the end, and Habiba (Amal Umar) did everything, and I mean everything possible to survive. The victims, the kidnappers, the conflicted neighbours and family members all carry their roles with a kind of raw honesty that refuses to let you detach emotionally. Their pain feels close. Their fear feels familiar.
The writing and direction lean fully into realism. The cruelty is unfiltered but never unnecessary. The film is both gripping and confronting. It is not entertainment for entertainment’s sake. It is a mirror. And that is why it stays with you long after the credits roll.
Yes, some storylines feel incomplete, but maybe that is deliberate. Life in a crisis does not offer clean resolutions. Maybe The Herd wants us to sit inside that untidiness and pay attention instead of looking away. And honestly, every Nigerian law enforcement officer should watch this film. It shows what policing could look like if they actually applied the same level of seriousness they use to track down people who insult the government online. In real life, terrorists have TikTok channels. They parade ransom money publicly. They move in large numbers across roads and forests without resistance. That will always raise questions about collusion and negligence.
If there is a sequel, I hope it continues the story and fills the gaps this film “intentionally” left open. What happened to the kidnappers who escaped? What became of the other victims? What Adama’s deal truly meant. How survivors cope with the weight of trauma. There is more to be told. And the truth is that stories like this matter. They remind us that behind every headline, every statistic, every report, there are real people with real suffering. Films like The Herd speak truths many refuse to face. In telling those truths, they push us a little closer to accountability and maybe, someday, to justice.
The Herd is streaming on Netflix.
