123 min | PG-13 | January 13, 2023 | Super LTD
Alice Diop moves from documentary to fiction with a courtroom drama about a Senegalese woman on trial for the death of her infant daughter. A novelist sits in the gallery to watch, and the trial becomes hers too. The film asks what a mother is and refuses to hand you an answer.
Rama is a novelist and academic who travels to the town of Saint-Omer to observe a trial. Laurence Coly stands accused of leaving her fifteen-month-old daughter on a beach to drown. Rama plans to use the case for a book about the myth of Medea. Alice Diop builds the film around the gap between watching and understanding. The trial offers facts and testimony and procedure. None of it explains the act, and the film is honest enough to admit that the explanation may not exist.
Guslagie Malanda plays Laurence Coly with a stillness that the courtroom cannot crack. She answers questions in precise, literary French and offers no remorse the court can recognize. Malanda makes her opacity the center of gravity. The more she speaks the less anyone knows. Kayije Kagame plays Rama as a woman undone by proximity to the case. Kagame works almost entirely through the face. She listens, and her listening carries her own pregnancy and her own fraught relationship with her mother into the room. Valerie Dreville plays La Presidente, the judge, with a probing patience that makes the interrogation feel like a slow excavation.
Diop and her co-writers Marie NDiaye and Amrita David build much of the script from the actual trial transcript. The dialogue keeps the formal cadence of legal testimony. Diop holds her camera on faces in long static shots and lets the testimony run without cutting away for reaction or relief. The frame fixes on the witness box and forces you to study a person while she speaks. There is almost no score. The silence between answers does the work, and the absence of music strips out any cue for how to feel.
This is a film about the limits of narrative when narrative meets a thing it cannot contain. Rama comes to harvest a story and leaves carrying a question she cannot close. The Medea framework promises an ancient explanation and the trial dismantles it. Diop refuses melodrama and refuses the catharsis a verdict is supposed to provide. She trusts the austerity of her method to hold an audience inside a horror that stays unresolved because resolution would be a lie.