In Review: 'Saint Omer' and 'Skinamarink'

From France: a gripping, complex courtroom drama inspired by a horrific crime. From Canada: a terrifying filmed nightmare.

Saint Omer
Dir. Alice Diop
122 min.

The basic facts in the case of Fabienne Kabou, a French woman born in Senegal who was sentenced to 20 years in prison after being found guilty of leaving her child to drown on a beach in northern France in 2013, were never much in dispute. Kabou had traveled from a town near Paris where she lived, checked the tide charts, fed her 15-month-old daughter Adélaïde, and then left her behind to be drowned on a cold night in November. It’s the facts surrounding the murder that make the story complicated. The case attracted international attention because of its shocking nature but also because of the seemingly conflicting elements that surrounded Kabou. A student of philosophy, she also claimed that witchcraft drove her to commit the murder. In Kabou’s own words “Nothing made sense in this story.” 

Writer and director Alice Diop’s Saint Omer is both an attempt to make what sense can be made of the story through a lightly fictionalized restaging of Kabou’s trial and an admission that such attempts have limits. It’s a film heavily influenced by Diop’s own reaction to the story. A documentarian making her narrative debut, Diop found herself fascinated with Kabou’s case, which she attended in person. With Saint Omer, she transfers that fascination to Rama (Kayije Kagame), a novelist and professor of literature who travels to the city of Saint-Omer to watch the trial of Laurence (Guslagie Malanga). 

Laurence is the film’s Kabou stand-in, but the details of her story line up closely with her inspiration: her difficult relationship with her Senegalese mother, her academic ambitions, her relationship with a much older white partner, the secrecy surrounding the birth of their daughter, and the daughter’s fate. The facts roll out over the course of the trial, each one complicating the assumption of those following the story. But the assumptions aren’t the same for everyone. Where the press and the white lawyers and judge are sometimes taken aback by Laurence’s intellectual interests and eloquence, Rama, who’s four months pregnant, finds herself reacting to the parallels between the life of the accused and her own. Early scenes and occasional flashbacks depict Rama’s discomfort and troubled history with her own Senegalese mother and she knows the prejudice Laurence has encountered all too well. Rama arrives with the intention of drawing parallels between Laurence’s story and that of Medea only to find that her subject doesn’t fit neatly into that, or any, narrative frame.

Saint Omer is a film of great restraint, both in its direction and in Kagame and Malanga’s remarkable performances. Malanga lets tearful moments give way to expressions of some kind of cryptic placidity. She’s a woman who can tell all without revealing anything. Diop mostly keeps the focus on the events of the trial, but makes every moment that veers away — like hotel room scenes that depict Rama’s increasingly difficult reaction to the trial and a conversation with Laurence’s mother as troubling as anything said on the stands — with significance. 

Diop lets issues of race, national identity, history, and gender roles float freely through the film without attempting to offer any neat conclusions. Laurence’s (and Kabou’s) crime might be a uniquely horrific isolated incident, but Saint Omer makes its connections to the larger world impossible to ignore. Her story may not make sense, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to be learned from it. —Keith Phipps

Saint Omer is now playing in limited release.

Skinamarink
Dir. Kyle Edward Ball
100 min.

Since debuting last summer at the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal—and circulating, through an unfortunate online leak, through various social media networks like TikTok and Reddit—Kyle Edward Ball’s $15,000 horror curio Skinamarink has gone viral, which is a fitting destiny for a movie that feels like a creeping malady that slowly takes over your body. No story, just vibes. Terrible, malevolent, nerve-shredding vibes. 

Though it isn’t a found-footage experiment in the Blair Witch vein, the film nonetheless feels like some evil artifact unearthed by genre archaeologists, and Ball’s entire strategy is to keep its meaning obscure. The narrative architecture feels as malleable as the modest, sparsely appointed two-story home that imprisons its pint-sized characters while shifting unpredictably around them. Stretches of extreme mundanity are punctuated by shocks of blood-curdling arbitrariness, like literal stabs in the dark. The rules of this supernatural scenario are obscure to nonexistent. If you find yourself asking the question, “What the hell is going on?” from first frame to last, then Ball has you completely on the line. 

Opening to retro titles and the ambience of dusty vinyl on a record player, Skinamarink takes place in 1995, a date that’s perhaps chosen to evoke a young adult’s childhood but is also useful in taking cell phone and HDTV technology out of the equation. In this domestic hell of landlines and cathode rays, two children in the preschool to kindergarten range, Kevin (Lucas Paul) and his older sister Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault), find themselves awake in the middle of the night. Their father has disappeared for reasons unknown,their mother is completely absent, for reasons also unknown, and the doors and windows in the house seem to be gone, too. Or at least they haven’t stayed in one place. 

The most obvious point of comparison to Skinamarink is Eraserhead, another low-budget experiment with a heavily worked-over soundtrack and physical action that suggests a state of mind more than graspable events. They’re both nightmares, in other words, except the nightmare in Eraserhead connects to distinctly adult anxieties about marriage, parenthood, and the existential condition of living in an industrialized environment. Ball’s film, by contrast, is about the base terrors of a child, which are simpler, connected to the vulnerability of living without a parent and being afraid of the dark. One of the first bad things to happen to Kevin and Kaylee is the night light in the living room that inexplicably gets unplugged. They keep the tube TV running all night, too, but that doesn’t seem to help as either illumination or distraction. 

While Ball does deliver the occasional jolt of terror—and one sustained scene involving a bedside apparition that’s crawl-under-the-seat scary—Skinamarink is an extended tease on the audience’s imagination, which is the best experience a $15,000 budget can buy. We never see the siblings’ faces, and the whispered exchanges between them are so minimal the script could probably fit on a cocktail napkin. Instead, Ball rigorously explores a space that hums with unseen menace and uncanny occurrences, drawing dim light from scant sources, like a TV that goes ghostly white when it’s not playing vintage cartoons from the public domain. He keeps you pinned to a child’s nightmare and chooses when to release you from it. —Scott Tobias

Skinamarink opens in limited release tomorrow. It will stream on Shudder soon.