Umjolo: My Beginnings, My End! 2025 Movie Review
Zuko Nodada’s “Umjolo: My Beginning, My End!” (2024) Is the latest installment in what appears to be a freshly bursting franchise corralled around romantic relationships that have hit a crisis or are tested by new scope of remaking. Unexpected realizations prop up once a third person walks in with the allure of possibility. Suddenly what one thinks of as the definitive relationship falls apart.
One is scared to accept the surge of new revelations in their conception of relationships presumed to be rock solid. Once lavished with true attention, the woman/man in the Umjolo films toys with transgressions. Yes, there are the moral hiccups they confront. But rather quickly, those are swept out of the way as they embrace with finality a flush of real happiness and love.
Mayi (Nirvana Nokwe-Mseleku) is introduced right at the start of the film as a woman who falls easily in love. She is celebrating her thirtieth birthday. There’s exultation in the air but also a tinge of precariousness. She is out at a bar with her friend. Mayi is drawn to one of the performing musicians, Zweli (Yonda Thomas). Sparks fly off immediately between them.
He invites her to join a nightcap. Mayi is hesitant at first and agrees gradually. There’s teasing and lively banter. Both are charmed by each other and can’t resist it, though Mayi appears to balk at times. Of course, they lean in to kiss. But things don’t advance beyond that. Mayi takes him to meet her father, who is instantly impressed and gladly takes him. It is then the major bump appears on the duo’s path to togetherness. She has a partner.
She has a ring in her hand. Zweli tells her he knows it. She is upset that he chose to pursue her despite noticing her engagement ring. Mayi herself can’t trust being riveted on him. Her friend warns her not to keel into her burst of impulsive attraction to Zweli. Her fiancé, Sizwe, is a rich heir. With him, her future is all set to be fancy. Zweli, on the other hand, is a struggling, mostly broke bookkeeper. How can she even fathom giving him a chance and throw her a life of good fortune?
She is stranded at a crossroads. Unknown to her, he has also been visiting her father, doing repair work. Another subplot emerges, the end of which is rather shallow and adds little to the narrative. The young attendant at Sizwe’s house is pregnant and gives birth. The biological father is none other than Sizwe’s father, who urges him to take the blame so that his mother doesn’t get to know.
Sizwe agrees to own up, while Mayi and Zweli consummate their relationship. Moreover, Zweli has a widowed sister-in-law, the discovery of whom upsets Mayi without her realizing the degree of their supposed closeness. She mistakenly assumes the sister-in-law is Zweli’s wife, whom he had kept hidden. It takes the latter to go up to Mayi and inform her of the real intricacies of the situation.
The climax is a frenzied tangle of discoveries and revelations, few of which are repressed giving rise to heartbreak and hilarity. Sizwe’s mother discovers the reality of the child. His father irons out her unease and grief by gifting her lavishly. Of course, she forgives him. Everything in the film is a shallow, icky compromise, a fit of anger and sadness that can be alleviated with the lure of money.
On the wedding day, Mayi arrives. She is still in knots over the entire situation, her marriage to Sizwe. All it takes is a word from her father who advises her to be chary of a marriage that seems alluring just because it is well-cushioned. Mayi and Sizwe exchange the nuptial vows. At the wedding, Zweli is present as well. He has come as a performer in the wings.
Distraught, he witnesses the exchange of the vows and goes away. At the final stage, when Mayi is asked to sign the documents that pronounce her and Sizwe as legal spouses, she flinches. It is her last chance to grab an alternative future of happiness. She seizes it and runs after Zweli with giddy joy and exhilaration. Everyone at the ceremony is stunned. Sizwe has no clue about this relationship. At least, Mayi gets to pursue a blissful life with Zweli, no matter if it’s going to be financially unsteady.
Infidelity and breach of trust swirl through the Umjolo franchise with constant, unabated force. These underpin the now-trilogy. Characters, minor and passing in the first, may assume centrality in the second, whereas protagonists of one may transmute into a fleeting, winking acknowledgment in the latter.
Nodada’s film wades into established notions and ideas entrenched in the earlier two installments. There’s little to no discovery of forbidden, fresh pleasure. Instead, a staleness wraps the narrative trajectory. We know what’s in store. The beats are so predictable that the emotions don’t land. Similarly, the actors seem to be sleepwalking through the formulaic terrain.
The Umjolo franchise is also laced with a certain jocularity extending to the chasm between swanky, stable options and transgressions which may not be as financially well-cushioned. Hence, the woman who strays in this film is cautioned against the recklessness to pivot to someone else, a broke individual, when she already has riches waiting for her. This film doesn’t even pretend to care about Mayi’s fiancé, trapped in a foolish plot where he has to repress the discovery of his father’s child by their young housemaid.
This sprouts humorous chaos and the film swivels back to Mayi’s conflict in choosing a new life partner. You wish the film anchored the choices of the individuals with a tad of intelligence and depth. Everything feels and seems careless, an inconvenience to be dismissed with money. The slim length of the film is to equal blame, lending no strength or coherence to the journeys characters take through romance and personhood.
