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Saint Omer Movie Review

Saint Omer is a 2022 French courtroom drama film directed by Alice Diop. It is a frustratingly uncinematic movie.

Rama is a novelist who attends the trial of Laurence Coly, a young woman accused of killing her 15-month-old daughter. Testimonies from witnesses and Coly’s own words soon shake Rama’s convictions. This movie was based on a real-life trial, which the director herself attended, so she did give the film a lot of real-life details. She also tried to empathize with the accused to a degree, which is never a good idea in my eye.

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First off, the acting performances are uniformly strong here. The filmmakers literally put all cameras on the eyes and faces of the people in the court, which did give a lot of emotion and authenticity to the proceedings. The dialogue is naturally also superb as it’s recreated from real life, and thus it felt very grounded.

But here we come to the root of the problem, which is its highly uncinematic approach to storytelling that isn’t just your regular courtroom drama, but an extremely documentarian version of such. I am talking about the poor cinematography and basically the lack of such as the movie consists of actors speaking their lines with camera never moving for the vast majority of its runtime.

And I do realize why some people would respond to Saint Omer emotionally due to that human authenticity, but for me movies need to be cinematic as otherwise they aren’t really movies, especially in an era of much more visually oriented television as well. This static approach led to not only technically inferior movie, but one that also bored me to tears, which is a huge issue as its premise demanded a much more interesting execution.

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