“I feel most individuals, if pushed, will do one thing questionable for a better good, or for his or her better good.” — Efosa Osaghae
By Adedamola Jones Adedayo
The promise of distant work lies within the freedom it’s believed to supply, permitting folks to earn a residing with out being confined to conventional workplace areas. However for a lot of freelancers, this freedom is an phantasm: fixed stress to be productive, reveal competence, and justify one’s employment turns it right into a steady cycle of efficiency.
British-Nigerian filmmaker Efosa Osaghae acknowledges the anxieties of distant work and the irony of the liberty it presents in Phantom Carousel (2026), a brief movie concerning the uneasy relationship between labour, surveillance and private ethics.
Phantom Carousel follows Bento Moura (Alec Christie), a person whose dire financial circumstances power him into covert work. Financially incapacitated and underneath household stress, he takes up a job in a compliance agency to spy on London’s distant workforce. Bearing a Prius and lengthy lens, he paperwork actions deemed incompatible with work, from an promoting inventive lacking company conferences to a mission supervisor dancing in his underwear and a software program developer prioritising a health club session over a shopper assembly.
Nonetheless, a routine project takes an surprising flip when Bento strikes on from stalking to breaking into the house of a employee, Olara Adeyemi (Babirye Bukilwa), an incident forcing him to confront the ethical implications of his work and query how far he’s ready to compromise his rules to maintain his job. What begins as a seemingly innocent office surveillance regularly exposes the disturbing absurdities of company oversight.
Written, directed, and edited by Osaghae, Phantom Carousel was beforehand screened on the 2026 HollyShorts Movie Competition and the Powerhouse London Movie Competition. The brief movie can be scheduled to premiere on the Norwich Movie Competition in November 2026. It’s produced by Jessica Emens, with Jed Darlington-Roberts serving as director of pictures.
Like many filmmakers whose tales are rooted in private realities, Osaghae traces the origin of his movie to his expertise as a freelancer. “I’ve additionally at all times been preoccupied by work itself, and by the efficiency of it. That theme was there from the beginning, and it was the spy story that grew out of it. I used to be curious about always-on tradition as one thing folks need to carry out, and in a movie world the place failing to carry out it’s handled as a criminal offense”
This preoccupation with the efficiency of labor is expressed by means of the movie’s illustration of a system during which the thought of productiveness is tied to fixed engagement and demonstration of competency. With Bento functioning as a covert investigator, Phantom Carousel examines what it means to be accountable and the way the hunt for accountability might intervene with one’s non-public affairs.
Whereas the movie may appear exaggerated, its issues have real-world parallels. Throughout his analysis, Osaghae discovered that Bento’s form of work can’t be divorced from actuality even when the movie fictionalises the state of affairs. “Weirdly sufficient, I additionally discovered that Bento’s job exists in actual life, although not fairly on this type,” he explains. “Within the UK, employers can actually rent non-public investigators to examine whether or not workers are mendacity about sick depart.”
This discovery provides a layer of immediacy to the movie’s exploration of office surveillance. However Phantom Carousel just isn’t excessively about how established programs govern particular person employment selections. Additionally it is a couple of protagonist whose conduct raises questions on private accountability, significantly when one’s financial instability blurs the excellence between what is correct and what’s crucial.
Bento comes off as a morally ambiguous character within the movie. His actions are trigger for concern and scrutiny, however his private circumstances make it simpler to attribute these actions to social stress and survival. This ambiguity impacts how Osaghae thinks about such characters. “I’m most curious about morally questionable protagonists,” the filmmaker discloses. “I feel most individuals, if pushed, will do one thing questionable for a better good, or for their better good.”
Creating this protagonist required discovering the suitable actor who may embody the complexity of the character with out relying closely on dialogue. Osaghae felt that he wanted an actor who may say lots with out saying a lot, a top quality that he present in Alec Christie. The emphasis on restrained efficiency additionally aligns with the movie’s minimalist strategy to storytelling, which adopts sparse exposition to convey Bento’s circumstances.
This restraint is additional corroborated by the movie’s tone. Combining darkish humour, social commentary and drama, Phantom Carousel takes on a topic that might simply turn out to be both a totally comedic critique of company tradition or a sombre examination of financial precarity. Sustaining a stability between these components with out undermining the movie’s general thematic issues equally boiled all the way down to editorial self-discipline. “I needed to be extraordinarily strict within the edit to maintain the tone secure sufficient to maintain the runtime,” Osaghae explains. “I minimize scenes and takes that have been overtly comedian, and I made certain the intense scenes by no means tipped into melodrama.”
With a runtime of roughly 19 minutes, Phantom Carousel encounters a problem attributable to its brief filmmaking type: the presentation of a world that feels sufficiently developed even inside inflexible temporal limitations. Specializing in the very fact and place of the working class in society, the movie explores office surveillance, financial insecurity, household relationships and private accountability, with every theme being self-sufficient to maintain a complete narrative.
“A major quantity of the movie was minimize to achieve 19 minutes,” Osaghae responds to a query about working across the movie’s time problem. “I needed to remind myself that it’s brief and the runtime must be revered, which meant reducing a variety of texture and environment in favour of getting straight to the story.” Nonetheless, Osaghae hopes to include the omitted components of the narrative materials right into a function or TV collection for a extra complete rendition of the story. However till then, the brief movie stays a concentrated presentation of the beliefs and struggles that he stands for and expects the viewers to attach with.
The title of the movie Phantom Carousel presents last insights into the world of Bento. The phrase “carousel” right here suggests a repetitive cycle of exercise, phantasm, and entrapment, whereas “phantom” refers back to the notion of being misleading, elusive or unreal. Put collectively, there may be the metaphorical impression of a cycle that’s tough to flee, a sign of Bento’s presumably infinite quest for survival.
“The title represents a trip we are able to’t get off as a result of it isn’t clear we’re on it,” Osaghae explains. “With out spoiling the ending, I feel it pays off with Bento’s last moments.”
Adedamola Jones Adedayo is a movie journalist and critic with particular curiosity in African cinema. By writing and audiovisual mediums, he creates conversations round cinema in Africa and the Diaspora. You’ll find him on Instagram @jonesthegoodboy and X on AdedamolaAdeda4.
