Review of Saint Omer

Saint Omer isn't flashy melodrama. In fact, it's barely a story. Rather, this is a delicate, complex parable about motherhood, identity, and history that uses race and sensationalist underpinnings to arrive at something astonishingly humane. The most fascinating thing about Saint Omer is that there are stories within stories within stories, and rather than tell (as so much dumbed-down contemporary cinema insists upon), director Diop patiently shows. It's a masterclass in suggestion, unreliable narrators, and family politics framed inside of linear courtroom drama. Saint Omer not only posits the question of how we frame literature and media into a self-narrative, but how in doing so one often conveniently obscures very specific truths about themselves and why they relate to the material. In the end, Diop's protagonist - a successful intellectual mother-to-be - comes face to face with her own expectations. The moment of realization is subtle, the conclusions so moving that the film silently screams it's hard-won message, leading the viewer to a conclusion as sublime and challenging as the myths of Medea it frequently references. Why would a woman kill her own child? Diop suggests that we all know the answer, we simply can't speak it out loud.

Brilliant, sophisticated, brutally intelligent and self-aware. This is top-tier filmmaking.