Saint Omer

2hrs 2mins (12A)

Challenging French courtroom drama ★★★★

This superb French-language film was inspired by director Alice Diop’s own experience of attending a court case in 2016, said Wendy Ide in The Observer. Kayije Kagame plays Rama, a pregnant writer who travels to the northern French town of Saint-Omer to watch a criminal trial, as part of her research for a book. The defendant in the case is a Senegalese immigrant (brilliantly played by Guslagie Malanda) who has been accused of killing her 15-month-old baby. Diop “deftly depicts the two women as distorted mirror images of each other”, and the story builds into a “meditative exploration of a complicated connection between the woman in the dock and the one who bears witness”. It all adds up to a film that is as “intellectually rigorous” as it is “intriguing”.

Saint Omer is in essence a “courtroom drama”, said Danny Leigh in the Financial Times, but it has none of the usual “gavel-banging clichés”. Instead, it is a “complex” and “layered” film that does far more than just mindlessly reconstruct what Diop saw unfolding in court (although some of the dialogue is lifted more or less verbatim from that trial). And even as it asks that darkest of questions – how could a mother murder her own child – it insists that “we seek the fullest picture, however nuanced and contradictory”. I’m afraid I found Saint Omer “dry, dull and bloodless”, said Kyle Smith in The Wall Street Journal. Yes, it doesn’t peddle clichés, and “adheres to what critics like to call ‘formal rigour’”, but that results in a truly punishing experience for ordinary viewers. Then when the ending is finally in sight, “the story dissolves into nothingness”. The “killing of an infant” surely deserves more attention than this oddly inert “metaphysical shrug”.