Nelson Makengo opens on pure black. Not the black of a fade-in or a stylistic choice easily forgotten — a black that holds long enough to feel like the subject itself. Kinshasa's electricity shortage isn't context here; it's the film's architecture, the condition that determines everything the camera can and cannot see. Shot almost entirely in Makengo's own neighbourhood of Kisenso, the film earns its intimacy the hard way: by being of this place, not visiting it. The difference shows in what it notices. Churchgoers wearing LED medallions to read their prayer books. Meals conducted by candlelight as a matter of routine, not romance. Younger residents organising to raise funds after stolen electric cables stripped the neighbourhood of what little infrastructure it had. These aren't curated poverty-tourism images — they're the ordinary texture of a community that has developed an entire shadow infrastructure to compensate for state failure. The soundscape does heavy structural work. Urban noise, religious chant, and news radio layer into a dense acoustic environment that refuses to let the film settle into the contemplative distance of most observational documentary. The news reports are particularly pointed: recurring references to a multi-billion-dollar hydroelectric plant backed by a major Chinese corporation, delayed repeatedly, dangle over the community like a promise that has learned to perform itself without ever arriving. Matriarchs in the community speak plainly about what darkness costs beyond inconvenience — the rise of crime, the sexual assaults that occur when public lighting disappears. Makengo doesn't editorialize around this. He places it alongside the community's resilience without resolving the tension into uplift. The camaraderie is real; the precarity is real; neither cancels the other out. The formal risk Makengo takes — building a documentary almost entirely in darkness, around absence, without a protagonist or conventional narrative arc — pays off more often than it doesn't. The nocturnal compositions acquire what the review rightly calls an otherworldly dimension: the mundane becomes dystopian not through manipulation but through sustained attention. Where the film is thinner is in its ambition to also be a geopolitical document. The Chinese hydroelectric project is raised repeatedly but never interrogated with the same depth the community scenes receive. It functions as atmosphere rather than argument, which is a missed opportunity given how directly it frames what state and corporate abandonment actually looks like at street level.
