"Saint Omer" and the Horror of Unknowability

How can we understand evil when not even the evildoers know what they do?

For a movie about a mother who kills her own child, Saint Omer is not quite the soul-crushing experience you might expect. This isn’t to say it’s an easy ride—any film that deals with infanticide is going to be an inherently difficult watch. Yet this film does not wish to inspire abject horror in its audience: We never see the act of killing itself, nor do we need to. Saint Omer, a courtroom drama of impressive scope, is about our own inability to understand. Just as the jurors sit watching the case before them, so do we as audience members have to ponder the question: How can we make sense out of such a horrifically evil act?

This is the first narrative feature by Alice Diop, a French documentarian with Senegalese roots. In 2016, Diop attended the trial of Fabienne Kabou, a Senegalese-French woman who was convicted for the murder of her fifteen-month-old daughter. Saint Omer, named after the town in which the trial took place, is Diop’s reckoning of her own experiences. She invents new faces for real people: Rama (Kayije Kagame), Diop’s stand-in, is a literature professor who travels to Saint-Omer to observe the trial of Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda), a philosophy student with a penchant for the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Much of the dialogue in the film is taken directly from the real court transcripts that inspired the case, giving the case a noted sense of verisimilitude. We are aware at each and every moment that Diop is creating a documentary about her own experiences, merely using the tools of a feature filmmaker.

In Saint-Omer, Rama attends the trial with open ears. A judge presents the facts of the case to Laurence Coly, who denies nothing—she freely admits to having drowned her daughter. But when the judge asks her why she did it, Laurence professes innocence: “I don’t know [why I killed my daughter]. I hope this trial will give me the answer.” Laurence is so aghast by her own actions that blames witchcraft and sorcery. How else could she have done something so cruel?

Everyone in the courtroom is as baffled as she is. Laurence’s ex-lover Luc Dumontet (Xavier Maly), a white Frenchman some 30 years her senior, is called to the stand in total confusion. He claims that both he and Laurence loved their child dearly, but cannot understand why she would kill her own child. When Laurence’s dissertation supervisor arrives at the stand, she expresses much the same, adding condescending commentary about her desire to write on Wittgenstein: “Why not pick a philosopher closer to her own culture?”

Saint Omer is wrapped in implicit questions about racial and colonial power dynamics, yet Diop wisely keeps them in the film’s background, asking the audience to take note where they can. Take the case of Luc Dumontet: Mr. Dumontet paid Laurence’s way through her postgraduate studies, but refused to be seen with her in public despite their seemingly loving affair. Was their relationship genuine, or was it a postcolonial sex fantasy? Over the course of testimonies from both parties, we begin to see layers of truth from either side, yet nothing definitive ever emerges. We are left to ponder these power dynamics in the same way that we ponder Laurence’s murder.

As all this goes on, Rama watches from the audience. She quietly contemplates the proceedings until, out of the corner of her eye, she notices Laurence looking at her. She stares, and she smiles. It’s a terrifying moment. The two women seem to share some sort of connection, and Rama is horrified. And why wouldn’t she be? A child murderer stares you down, a pleasant smile across her face—wouldn’t you be running for the hills?

Yet the two women share more in common than we might have assumed. We come to learn that, like Laurence, Rama is pregnant with her own child from a mixed-race relationship, and, also like Laurence, has a strained relationship with her Senegalese mother. Diop does not draw these comparisons accidentally, nor does she signpost them. They are instead left as another question for the audience to decipher: Another puzzling, unanswerable connection that feels dramatic, confounding, and terrifying all at once.

Therein lies the brilliance of Saint Omer. The film takes place in a courtroom, that ultimate bastion of truth and justice, and finds within it a center of unknowability. Subjects of motherhood, modernity, and colonialism flood the frame without ever being foregrounded, acting as constituent components to a trial that seems, by the end, to lead nowhere.