Review of Saint Omer, directed by Alice Diop

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

There was a period throughout 2025 where I was left unemployed, and I was so incredibly grateful to be in the financial situation where if I wanted to take a break and step away from the grind, I could. I didn’t intend for it to be as long as it was, as I was applying to over 300 jobs and couldn’t find a position. Not a great time to job hunt during one of one of the worst job markets in decades.

I am happy to report I did find a job, but when I was unemployed I was watching a lot of movies and reading books in order to fill the time when I wasn’t spending it stalking LinkedIn and Indeed.

But before then, I was writing a lot of blog posts about the movies and shows I was watching, and this post is from one of them. This is actually going to be one of the last blog posts before I start my job, so my twice-a-day schedule is probably going to be cut back a bit.

Anyways: today’s blog post is on Saint Omer! I remember originally wanting to see this in theaters, but they were never showing it around where I lived, and when they did, it was always a time where I had class or work to do. So when I saw this was available on Kanopy through my library, I jumped at the opportunity to watch it.

Let’s get into the review.

A pregnant professor attends the trials of an immigrant woman who killed her child.

For those looking for a lot of drama and action on the screen, this might not be the movie for you. This is a movie that’s very much about the trial taking place, and a good chunk of the scenes and the dialogue are set during said trial. We learn a lot about these characters not only in how they respond to these stressors, but how they engage with them as well.

There are two layers to this story. The first is Rama, our protagonist. She’s a literature professor and a writer who works and lives in Paris, and she’s pregnant at the time of this movie, and we see her giving a lecture. After this, she boards a train from Paris to the saint of Saint-Omer, where a big trial is happening.

There is the second layer to this story: Laurence Coly. A Senegalese immigrant to France, she’s now being put on trial for purposely neglecting her child and leaving her to drown on a beach. Her daughter was only 15 months old, but, as we see throughout the course of the trial, she was basically struggling with a lot of her own issues when this happened.

We see Coly’s partner, who is older and a white Frenchman, and Rama sees the parallels to her own life in that relationship. Coly was a graduate student at the time of the trial, although she had external stressors beyond school. There was not only her relationship and daughter, but the fact she has a complicated relationship with her parents and life back home in Senegal.

Rama continues to go to the trial sessions, where we learn more about Coly and her actual character, and we realize that this is because she sees a part of herself in Coly. Rama, too, is the daughter of a Senegalese immigrant and struggling with the relationship between her mother and her, she’s in a mixed race relationship, and she’s about to have a child of her own.

She decides that she wants to write about the Greek myth of Medea through the realm of this case eventually, especially as she learns more of Coly’s life and how isolated she left when she was living in France as a Black African immigrant. This leads to complicated feelings with Rama, who begins evaluating her own life.

We see her distressed about this, even though the film never gives us the outcome of Coly’s trial. Despite Rama’s previous obsession with it, and the tears she shed due to the anxiety of what happened, the outcome isn’t as necessary as to what we learned throughout the trial.

Instead, we see Rama returning to Paris, to life as normal, and how she tries to spend time with her mother and heal their relationship.

Overall Thoughts

I’ve been wanting to learn more about the Black and African community in France, and I think this movie is a good primer for what’s to come. I’ve read the American perspectives, like Baldwin and the biographies of Josephine Baker, but I want to dig deeper into the African colonial experience in the nation that once exerted its power over their homelands.

This such a good trial movie, and it reminded me of Anatomy of a Fall at times. I think I prefer this one to Anatomy because of the nature of the story, we learn from Coly how terrible it was for her to be living in France. For many, this is a step up from the homeland and a chance of opportunity, but we see the consequences of what happened to this one young woman, She was not happy.

Regardless of what she did or not, I think this was a powerful film because of that. This is why Rama was so captured with this case—she could see herself in it, which is something that the children of many African immigrants could probably realize when they watched this. I believe I read somewhere this was based on Diop attending a case like this, so I could see how this is personal.

Go watch this if you haven’t already and are interested. Movies are meant to be seen, not read about, and this is definitely a movie that needs to be seen!

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