The 4th Generation

In The 4th Generation, Laila wakes screaming from a dream where a heavy basin passes from great-grandmother to grandmother to mother, each struggling under its weight. She has fled her marriage to Michael, a kind but excessively gentle man, because she feels bored and irritated by the absence of conflict. She returns to her mother's house where three generations of women reside. Her mother reveals she has been having the same recurring dream and senses a spiritual pattern behind the family's history of failed marriages and women returning to the maternal home. The mother consults an Alfa who diagnoses a generational curse that traces back to Laila's great-grandfather Azeez, who made a pact with a spiritualist because he was desperate for enduring wealth down to the fourteenth generation. The pact cursed every female descendant to despise her husband and inevitably return to her mother's house. The great-grandmother confesses her role in initiating the curse. Laila's mother demands a spiritual solution and Laila resists and dismisses it as superstition, and the family fractures along lines of faith and control. The ritual to break the generational curse is performed on the beach. An Alfa leads the prayers and a traditionalist babalawo confronts him, and each claims spiritual authority over the ceremony. The women dressed in white participate in a coordinated dance and cast small boxes into the ocean to symbolically release the generational load, and the great-grandmother dies as the curse is declared broken. The atmosphere shifts from confrontation to catharsis as the women weep and embrace while the heavy basin from the opening dream is finally set down. Laila and Michael reconcile and she agrees to return to her husband's house and commits to the marriage and to observing the five daily prayers. The grandmother blesses the couple and prays for male and female children and a lasting union. Laila promises never to return to her mother's house.