Saint Omer

7/4/2025

I generally like the style of French courtroom dramas. They lack the stuffy formality of the more typical judicial scenarios and are generally much more combative. This one isn’t so much about the crime, but more about our appreciation and perhaps forgiveness of it’s causes. Senegalese arrival in France “Laurence” (Gustalgie Malanda) is on trial for a murder we know she committed. She took her newborn baby and left it on the beach at high tide whereupon it duly drowned. She’s perfectly open about that but claims that she was the victim of sorcery, perhaps emanating from the spirits in her homeland, and that she had little memory or consciousness of the deed. This case is being observed by a writer, “Rama” (Kayije Kagame), who is also having issues around a pregnancy of her own and that ser