Neon Sets December 11 Release for Cannes Hit 'Clarissa'

Neon will release Clarissa, Arie and Chuko Esiri's Lagos-set adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, in the United States on December 11. The distributor has now unveiled the first trailer ahead of the date.

The film premiered as a highlight of the 2026 Directors' Fortnight at Cannes, where it earned a reputation as a festival favorite. Rory O'Connor, reviewing the film for The Film Stage out of Cannes, called it "a formally adventurous showcase for Sophie Okonedo."

The Esiri twins broke out in 2020 with Eyimofe: This Is My Desire, a Berlinale premiere that toured the festival circuit and won the siblings a joint Best Director award at the African equivalent of the Oscars. O'Connor placed Clarissa within that trajectory, writing: "Similar to that movie, Clarissa appears to be the latest in an ongoing experiment to capture the heightened and melodramatic mood of Nollywood cinema through the lens of the arthouse—not as a means to subvert those tropes, necessarily, but more to rework and reexamine them as filmmakers like Pedro Almodóvar and Todd Haynes have done over the years with telenovelas and daytime TV."

The Esiris lean into those melodramatic stylings openly, drawing on Nollywood, Almodóvar and Haynes as reference points for their take on Woolf's 1925 modernist novel.

Sophie Okonedo leads the cast as Clarissa. The official synopsis lays out the premise: "Across a single day in Lagos, Nigeria, Clarissa (Sophie Okonedo) prepares to host a high society party at her home, as her complicated past begins to consume her, in the form of now-distant friends and loves from her youth. Simultaneously, Septimus (Fortune Nwafor), a young soldier, is haunted by his own memories of the horrors he has witnessed and endured. As the perspectives traverse past and present, across the bourgeois class and those too easily forgotten by society, a delicate portrait of contemporary Nigeria emerges. Directors Arie and Chuko, adapting Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, take the renowned source material and deliver a unique and deeply felt story."

The structure mirrors Woolf's novel, which unfolds over a single day as Clarissa Dalloway prepares a party while the shell-shocked veteran Septimus Warren Smith moves toward his crisis. The Esiris transpose that dual trajectory to contemporary Lagos, splitting their narrative between the city's bourgeois elite and, as the synopsis puts it, "those too easily forgotten by society."

Unlike many Cannes selections that wait months or years for distribution, Clarissa arrives in U.S. theaters barely half a year after its French premiere. The December 11 date positions the film squarely in the awards corridor, where Okonedo's performance and the Esiris' direction are likely to draw attention from critics' groups.