Saint Omer
Super LTD | Release Date: January 13, 2023 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
91
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 36 Critic Reviews
Positive:
34
Mixed:
1
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
89
Austin ChronicleJosh KupeckiJan 11, 2023
It is riveting and uncompromising cinema of the highest order. Read full review
100
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsJan 13, 2023
Above all Saint Omer is a singularly moving courtroom drama. Read full review
100
CineVueJohn BleasdaleSep 12, 2022
Saint Omer is a deeply intellectual film – Medea is referenced several times as a frame of understanding – but it’s also heartfelt. There is a compassion to the dispassion: an empathy. Read full review
100
ColliderChase HutchinsonJan 12, 2023
It reveals its most haunting truths to us slowly even as it seems to lay all its cards on the table early on. In doing so, it confronts us with deeper truths we would otherwise ignore. Read full review
100
EmpireLillian CrawfordFeb 6, 2023
Alice Diop’s documentarian approach to the courtroom drama is fresh and urgent, consistently commanding attention to the women as they speak and listen. A philosophical discourse delivered with astonishing clarity. Read full review
83
IndieWireSophie Monks KaufmanSep 12, 2022
With her first fiction feature, Diop lets real material speak with an ancient sadness, with hope offered in the form of Rama who keeps moving, carrying a burden of knowledge into the birth of a brave new life. Read full review
88
LarsenOnFilmJosh LarsenDec 15, 2022
Far from a courtroom procedural, however, Saint Omer expands beyond those wood-paneled walls to consider how culture, colonialism, biology, and race determine what women experience—and how society views them because of those determinations. Read full review
90
Little White LiesDavid JenkinsFeb 3, 2023
With Saint Omer, Diop not only refreshes and expands upon the tired conventions of the courtroom drama, but she really drills down into the fundamental gaps in our understanding of human nature and the tantalising but illusive ‘why?’ of it all. Read full review
50
Movie NationRoger MooreJan 13, 2023
While there are things to be explored and pondered in drab “Saint Omer,” Diop’s organization of her message and lack of prioritization of simple courtesy-to-the-viewer information we need in order to follow the story and answer that fundamental question, “What the hell is this thing about?” leaves a lot to be desired. Read full review
100
ObserverEmily ZemlerJan 11, 2023
This is a film that everyone, but particularly women, should see. It is a core-shattering experience in every frame. Read full review
100
Original-CinLiam LaceyJan 17, 2023
It’s a stripped-down French legal drama, with a carefully controlled, expanding emotional impact, touching on matters of motherhood, gender, immigration and race. Read full review
87
Paste MagazineAndrew CrumpJan 17, 2023
Saint Omer views Kabou’s crime and the story unfolding in its wake through the lenses of motherhood and daughterhood, arguing that neither can be disentwined from the other. Read full review
100
RogerEbert.comSheila O'MalleyJan 13, 2023
Alice Diop understands how silence, when allowed to exist, vibrates with echoes, and it is these echoes that are trying to speak to us. They have a lot to say. "Saint Omer" shows us how to listen. Read full review
90
Rolling StoneK. Austin CollinsJan 17, 2023
Diop’s direction of Saint Omer is spare in style but dense in emotional intelligence, heavy with its own inquiries. Read full review
90
Screen DailyWendy IdeSep 12, 2022
There’s a combination of humane sensitivity and intellectual agility at play in this story. Read full review
80
Screen RantAlexander HarrisonJan 19, 2023
Viewers willing to give it the same, almost spellbound focus the protagonist gives this case will find it a compelling meditation on things as wide-ranging as racial otherness, fraught mother-daughter relationships, and the real-world slipperiness of concepts like truth and justice. Read full review
88
Slant MagazinePat BrownOct 5, 2022
If courtroom dramas are usually about taking a stand, Saint Omer shows us that the most impactful truths often go unspoken. Read full review
80
SlashfilmBarry LevittFeb 1, 2023
Saint Omer is an intelligent, absorbing drama that had me under its intoxicating spell. Read full review
95
SlashfilmCaroline CaoOct 5, 2022
Saint Omer peels back the curtain on how society formulates judgments according to a person's race and cultural background while absolving itself of the systemic flaws. Read full review
100
The A.V. ClubMurtada ElfadlJan 13, 2023
This is a rich text, bracing for the minutiae it includes and for what it excises. Its power comes from a director who knows exactly what story they want to tell and how to tell it well. Read full review
88
The Associated PressJocelyn NoveckJan 12, 2023
Most crucially, it’s a film so original in approach that one feels only Diop could have made or even conceived of it. Read full review
83
The Film StageJake Kring-SchreifelsOct 7, 2022
Saint Omer isn’t a movie concerned specifically with a verdict. It asks you to listen, to observe and consider a tragedy and its ripples within a community. Read full review
90
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Barry HertzJan 17, 2023
Whether, in making Saint Omer, Diop has found the answers that she’s been searching for since 2016 remains an open question. But the truth of the film is that she has certainly compelled her audience to take a complicated, fraught, and harrowing journey of their own. Read full review
100
The GuardianPeter BradshawFeb 2, 2023
The severity and poise of this calmly paced movie, its emotional reserve and moral seriousness – and the elusive, implied confessional dimension concerning Diop herself – make it an extraordinary experience. Read full review
100
The Hollywood ReporterLovia GyarkyeSep 12, 2022
Saint Omer might be fiction, but Diop does not stray too far from her documentary roots. The film maintains a sense of naturalism even during its most tense moments. Diop’s directing style leans observational, as if she is watching and recording her screenplay’s effect on her performers. Read full review
100
The Irish TimesTara BradyFeb 3, 2023
Despite the claustrophobic setting, Diop crafts an evocative modern retelling of Medea, with detailed notes on femininity, immigration and race. Read full review
90
The New York TimesA.O. ScottJan 12, 2023
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. Read full review
80
The New YorkerRichard BrodyJan 17, 2023
Diop does more in “Saint Omer” than create an original and far-reaching courtroom drama; she establishes an aesthetic, distinctive to the courtroom setting, that seemingly puts the characters’ language itself in the frame along with the psychological vectors that connect them. This spare and straightforward method gives rise to a film of vast reach and great complexity. Read full review
70
The New YorkerAnthony LaneJan 9, 2023
Diop’s work has been in documentary; now we have her first feature, Saint Omer... which retains the attentiveness—the patient ardor—of a good documentary. Read full review
80
The Observer (UK)Wendy IdeFeb 17, 2023
Inspired by Diop’s own experience of attending the trial of a woman accused of murdering her baby, it’s a meditative exploration of a complicated connection between the woman in the dock and the one who bears witness. Read full review
91
The PlaylistRobert DanielsSep 12, 2022
Diop’s Saint Omer doesn’t condescend to the viewer by slinking toward black-and-white offerings of good and evil, or broad statements about race or gender. This ripped-from-the-headlines narrative accomplishes a feat far more creative, and a bit less forced. It dances on the surface of these participants, and in their subtle ripples, to reveal the humanity in the seemingly inhumane. Read full review
100
The TelegraphTim RobeyFeb 17, 2023
The film mounts its thesis while hardly needing to verbalise what’s going on: it mesmerises by reaching inside them to listen, even while others talk. Read full review
91
TheWrapRonda Racha PenriceSep 12, 2022
In her narrative debut, Diop has found a way to mix her hard-hitting documentary style with fiction to raise a mirror to society. This new arena, with its wider reach, makes Diop an exciting filmmaker to watch. Read full review
80
Time OutKaleem AftabSep 16, 2022
The powerhouse denouement is a staggering insight into how colonial legacies continues to affect lives today. Read full review
100
VarietyJessica KiangSep 17, 2022
Saint Omer challenges accepted ideas of perspective, of subjectivity and objectivity — and even of what cinema can be when it’s framed by an intelligence that doesn’t accept those accepted ideas. Read full review
30
Wall Street JournalKyle SmithJan 12, 2023
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. Read full review
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