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Saint Omer
Directed by
Alice Diop
PG-13
2022
2h 2m
Drama
,
Crime
6.8
95%
56%
Rent for $3.99
Follows Rama, a novelist who attends the trial of Laurence Coly at the Saint-Omer Criminal Court to use her story to write a modern-day adaptation of the ancient myth of Medea, but things don't go as expected.
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Cast of Saint Omer
Kayije Kagame
Rama
Guslagie Malanda
Laurence Coly
Aurélia Petit
Maître Vaudenay
Valérie Dréville
La Présidente
Xavier Maly
Luc Dumontet
Robert Cantarella
Avocat général
Salimata Kamate
Odile Diata
Thomas De Pourquery
Adrien
Adama Diallo Tamba
Seynabou
Mariam Diop
Khady
Dado Diop
Tening
Charlotte Clamens
Cécile Jobard
Seyna Kane
Seynabou jeune
Coumba-Mar Thiam
Rama adolescente
Binta Thiam
Rama enfant
Alain Payen
L'éditeur (voice)
Louise Lemoine Torrès
Maître Darcourt (voice)
Roald Iamonte
Christelle Lefait
Yann Lehoux
Alice Diop
Director / Writer
Amrita David
Writer
Marie N'Diaye
Writer
Toufik Ayadi
Producer
Christophe Barral
Producer
Saint Omer Ratings & Reviews
Kevin Ward
July 4, 2025
Centered on a trial based on a true life case in which a Senegalese woman killed her own infant daughter, Alice Diop’s Saint Omer mines this extremely unique case for some very harsh truths about motherhood, womanhood, the immigrant experience, …. and so much more. Guslagie Malanda gives an absolutely mesmerizing performance as Laurence Coly, the mother on trial. Her performance is nuanced in such a way that she vividly recounts the killing of her own daughter and yet her testimony, her demeanor, her candor have you on edge of your seat desperate for the possibility that she’s not truly at fault. Our entry into the story isn’t Coly’s perspective. It is actually Rama (Kayiji Kagame), a writer attending the trial in hopes of writing a book about it. Rama discovers numerous parallels between Coly’s situation and her own life, and by extension the audience does too. Saint Omer had me completely engrossed. The two lead performances are excellent and Diop’s direction is really powerfully executed. It’s a complex film that may turn off viewers looking for a more straightforward courtroom drama, but I was incredibly moved. The closing statement from Coly’s defense attorney and the acknowledging glance between Coly and Rama made for a very potent finish. Highly recommend.
New York Magazine/Vulture
Alison Willmore
Alice Diop's stunner of a film tucks a whole fraught universe into a courtroom drama.
The New Republic
Jennifer Wilson
Diop resists the temptation to let Laurence off the hook altogether, to attribute her actions and motivations solely to mistreatment. To do so would be to deprive her of her humanity...
The Atlantic
Nicole Acheampong
In this narrative-fiction debut, the director Alice Diop understands that a restrained image can be more haunting than a graphic one.
Christian Science Monitor
Peter Rainer
A powerful and perplexing film.
FilmWeek (LAist)
Amy Nicholson
It's not an easy film to watch. You really have to be in the mood for something uncompromising. I admit, it took me three times to really sit down and watch this with the focus it deserves.
NPR
John Powers
What makes the movie unforgettable are the scenes in the courtroom, every moment of them gripping.
Rolling Stone
K. Austin Collins
Diop's direction of Saint Omer is spare in style but dense in emotional intelligence, heavy with its own inquiries. The visual set-ups seem simple, but they are constantly carving away at the harrowing question of what people are thinking.
AV Club
Murtada Elfadl
The screenplay, alongside Kagmae's restrained performance, takes its time to connect the dots, making Saint Omer's payoff even grander.
Chicago Tribune
Michael Phillips
Diop has turned a straightforward premise into the stuff of unassuming, unexpected and authentic poetry.
The New Yorker
Richard Brody
A film of vast reach and great complexity.
Wall Street Journal
Kyle Smith
Throughout this dry, dull and bloodless movie, nothing like an honest grappling with the depravity of killing one's own infant ever seems to occupy anyone's attention.
Ty Burr's Watch List (Substack)
Ty Burr
"Saint Omer" works on both an emotional and an intellectual level, the here and now and the mythic...
RogerEbert.com
Sheila O'Malley
What a powerful film.
4Columns
Melissa Anderson
This immensely intelligent film ... exposes a host of limits-of empathy, self-knowledge, language, cultural understanding-while it expands into infinite possibilities regarding the timeworn genres of the courtroom thriller and the immigrant tale.
Los Angeles Times
Justin Chang
It's a movie about the problem of identification, the effort it takes to actually see every individual as the protagonist of their own specific, unknowable story.
New York Times
A.O. Scott
An intellectually charged, emotionally wrenching story about the inability of storytelling - literary, legal or cinematic - to do justice to the violence and strangeness of human experience.
Associated Press
Jocelyn Noveck
A film that exists somewhere in the space between documentary and scripted narrative, between truth and fiction. Most crucially, it's a film so original in approach that one feels only Diop could have made or even conceived of it.
Austin Chronicle
Josh Kupecki
Saint Omer is no small feat. It is riveting and uncompromising cinema of the highest order.
Observer
Emily Zemler
The film carefully walks the line between astute intellectual observation and emotionally harrowing contemplation.
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Saint Omer (US Trailer 1)
Saint Omer (US Trailer 1)
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