Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Saint Omer’ on Hulu, A Masterpiece of Maternal Drama

The Oscars are not life’s report card, and who’s to say what history will think in years to come that All Quiet on the Western Front won 2022’s trophy for Best International Feature. What already looks ludicrous, though, is that French entry Saint Omer (now streaming on Hulu) was not even nominated alongside it. Though maybe that’s a fitting tribute to how Alice Diop’s film cuts across boundaries and cannot simply be defined as the product of one nation. This French feature seeks nothing less than to redefine the very image of the Black woman in society through a gripping, graceful courtroom drama.

SAINT OMER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The what of the case is never in doubt. French-Senegalese woman Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda) drowned her young daughter in the ocean at the start of the film (action seen off-screen, for those worried). The argument in front of the court never seeks to dispute her actions, only to clarify the motives behind them. Her defense does this by illuminating the myriad failures of French society to protect Laurence from abuse, exploitation, and insult. While Saint Omer does not look to absolve the defendant, it does hope to explain her.

In the crowd watching it all unfold as something more complicated than an avatar for the author or the audience is Rama (Kayije Kagame), an accomplished professor of a similar national background who attends the trial out of morbid curiosity. What she thinks she’s getting is a contemporary version of the Medea myth. What she actually gets is an experience that rocks her to the core, surfacing unresolved tensions with her own mother as she prepares to deliver her own child. What really separates Laurence from Rama after all but a thin divide in a courtroom?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: In a lecture early in the film, Rama spells out the intellectual framework as owing much to multidisciplinary artist Margarite Duras. As such, Saint Omer belongs in a class of films with the Duras-penned Hiroshima Mon Amour with a sociological interest in how humans relate to tragedy. But in simply absorbing the film as it plays out, the structure resembles a courtroom drama like 12 Angry Men where the audience goes back and forth about the innocence of a character.

Performance Worth Watching: Remember the name Guslagie Malanda (pictured above). As Laurence Coly, the film’s focal point, she’s a tremendous screen presence even as she seems to dissolve into the walls of the witness stand. Simply watching her painfully recount everything that led her to such tragic ends proves riveting cinema. Malanda’s slow-burning intensity on the stand quickly becomes a devastating barn burner in one moment of jolting release.

Memorable Dialogue: The film’s entire closing court argument, the “chimera�� speech, feels packed full of one gut-punch observation after another. But it’s the final line that really drives home the theme of the film: “In a way, us women, we are all monsters, but we are terrible human monsters.”

Sex and Skin: While sexual violence is a subject of discussion on the stand, there’s nothing in this realm actively depicted within the film.

Our Take: It’s nothing short of astounding to see how Alice Diop can masterfully collapse divisions within Saint Omer. The film is simple to understand in its construction yet rigorous to watch unfold in its execution. Her gentle editing rhythms favoring extended takes and limited cuts allow us to sit with her straightforward yet staggering framing. By drawing inspiration from the look of Renaissance painting, Diop issues a rejoinder to our thinking of who belongs in such stylized art, placing Black women deftly and defiantly in places where they have historically been excluded. She elevates their concerns as society’s frequently overlooked class, both as specifically to redress and universally with which to empathize.

But even if you don’t want to meet Diop on her lofty intellectual level, Saint Omer still welcomes you in as a masterful human story. Drawing inspiration from the real trial of Fabienne Kabou, a French woman who also killed her own daughter, Diop peels back the layers of societal neglect that could push anyone into a seemingly unfathomable situation. The goal is never to make the audience agree, simply to understand. She achieves that and more by the film’s stirring end, which can hold the seemingly contradictory sensations of both bleakness in the present and hopefulness for the future. This is what great art should do.

Our Call: STREAM IT! Saint Omer is a masterful exploration and explosion of courtroom drama conventions with so much more on its mind than innocence and guilt. Alice Diop asks her viewers to put nothing short of their views of Black women on trial at both a personal and societal level. The verdict? Enlightenment, enrichment, enragement, entertainment.

Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based freelance film journalist. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared on Slashfilm, Slant, The Playlist and many other outlets. Some day soon, everyone will realize how right he is about Spring Breakers.

Watch Saint Omer on Hulu