The legend of Madam Koi-koi has always haunted the minds of young girls thrust into the world and all its multiple horrors. She’s myth wrapped in panic and fear of punitive demons that haunt the eventide, a stilettos-wearing spectre conjured at the intersection of adolescence, patriarchy, and the paranoia of over-policed girlhood. Yet, Ms. Kanyin treats her like a Pinterest mood board or a fashion accessory, as it refuses to investigate the gore of the legend. It avoids blood, bodily anxiety, and subtext. Just casually cruising. 

In the world Jerry Ossai (3 working days, off the menu) constructs, sex is a foreign exchange subject, not a lurking social force. The threat of female sexuality is sanitised. Instead of asking why we’ve created a ghost to punish young women for growing pains, the film offers us aesthetic detachment. It’s horror with no teeth.

For the uninitiated: Madame Koi-Koi, or Ms. Koi-Koi, depending on your geography or grandmother, is Nigeria’s version of Bloody Mary. She haunts the dorms of girls’ schools, clicking her crimson heels down the halls of pubescent dread. A perfect vessel, then, for anxieties around adolescence, sexuality, and feminine disobedience. However, in the Prime Video film, Ms. Kanyin politely declines to do anything with all that. It offers horror without menace, adolescence without stakes, and femininity without threat. The ghost is here, but the haunt is gone.

Michelle Dede, who plays the titular character, is a Paris-aspiring French teacher whose glamour is always already too much for her context. She’s elegant, stylish, competent; three qualities that, in a Nigerian boarding school, amount to a moral failing. The students adore her; the teachers distrust her. This is a familiar archetype: the woman who dares to be exceptional without apology. In another film, she would be punished. In this one, she just… evaporates.

When Amara (Temi Otedola) underperforms in a French mock exam, the mask slips. Ms. Kanyin goes from aspirational to suspicious, and suddenly the mythos becomes apparent. The students, led by a clique with names like Finditae (Kanaga Eme Jnr) and Fiona (Aduke Shittabey), because Nigerian teens now come pre-branded, start to investigate. There are whisperings. There are stairwells. There is Natse Jemide, who is here mostly to glisten and stare handsomely. Not necessarily in that order. Not necessarily orienting towards anything significant.

Ossai directs the film with the steady hand of someone who has attended media school and knows where to place the camera, but not always why. The visuals are textbook Nemsia: everything is airbrushed, with colour grading that is aggressive to the point of alienation. People do not appear to exist so much as they are rendered—like Midjourney NPCs in a post-Lumen 3D showroom. The school itself is lit like a music video for a brand that sells girlboss vitamins. There’s too much crispness, not enough fear. Which is a shame, because horror, at its best, is always about texture.

What Ms. Kanyin ultimately lacks is a point of view. Not just narratively, but ideologically. It tiptoes toward folklore, flirtatiously gestures at paranoia, but never commits to the psychological substrate of the legend it retools. Madam Koi-Koi is a prime candidate for gendered horror and a spectre born of institutional cruelty, sexual repression, and the punishment of feminine allure. But in this version, she’s just an enigma in lipstick.

This is not to say the film is unwatchable. Temi Otedola, whose debut in Citation was marked by hesitation and pout, turns in a performance that, if not electric, is at least plugged in. She simmers, sulks, and bites. It helps that the script, by Tobe Otuogbodor and Yemi Nexus Adeyemi, finally allows a “brilliant student” to be something other than a walking civic education textbook. Here, smarts don’t cancel out spite. Ambition comes with attitude. Which is to say, the girls have range.

However, even good performances cannot save a film that lacks interiority. Ms. Kanyin is technically a ghost story, but it’s haunted by its own refusal to look inward. The horror never transcends the plot. There’s no sexual unease, no socio-religious repression, no embodied terror. It all feels, well, safe and haunted women, if they’re anything, are not secure. People often forget that being a teenage girl itself is an onslaught of indescribable horrors.

There are a few jump scares that might make the popcorn tremble. Still, the real fright is that we’ve taken such a potent myth and rendered it into a school assembly theatre for the obligatory applause from students desperately trying not to die from an embarrassment of many hands. No one here gets eaten, spiritually or metaphorically. The red shoes never stomp. They just click quietly away into nothing.