Saint Omer

Alice Diop’s stunner of a film tucks a whole fraught universe into a courtroom drama.

At the end of it certain facts still don’t add up. They nag at you in what is otherwise a compelling film about motherhood in all its contradictions.

Diop resists the temptation to let Laurence off the hook altogether, to attribute her actions and motivations solely to mistreatment. To do so would be to deprive her of her humanity...

Alice Diop’s documentarian approach to the courtroom drama is fresh and urgent, consistently commanding attention to the women as they speak and listen.

Diop deftly depicts the two women as distorted mirror images of each other: Rama recognises something in Laurence even as she abhors her crime.

The film mounts its thesis while hardly needing to verbalise what’s going on: it mesmerises by reaching inside them to listen, even while others talk.

Saint Omer, a nominal courtroom drama, is a multifaceted and astounding gem of a film, posing moral and political quandaries that generate a wealth of intellectual and emotional consequences for viewer and character alike.

Saint Omer is unforgettable and crucial. It does not forgive Coly, but it begs us to understand how such a terrible crime happened, and all the events that were not seen as criminal because they are baked into the fabric of society led to tragedy.

Diop restrains herself and leaves the audience to bask in the juxtaposition between heritage, catharsis, memories, healing, and its quick touches of psychological surrealism.

Diop equips her talents as a documentarian to establish a naturalism to this courtroom drama.