Saint Omer

Rama, a writer in her thirties, sits in the courtroom at Saint-Omer in northern France, watching the trial of Laurence Coly, a young woman charged with killing her fifteen-month-old daughter by leaving the child on a beach as the tide came in. Rama had hoped the case might become the basis for a contemporary reworking of the Medea story. Instead, as the proceedings unfold, the testimony and the defendant's own words unsettle her assumptions and draw her toward uncomfortable questions about motherhood and her own family history.

Saint Omer is a French crime drama directed by Alice Diop, written with Marie N'Diaye and Amrita David, and produced by Christophe Barral and Toufik Ayadi. It is the director's first fiction feature, followed by Amour(s) in 2026. Kayije Kagame plays Rama, with Guslagie Malanda as Laurence Coly. The supporting cast includes Aurélia Petit, Valérie Dréville, Xavier Maly and Robert Cantarella, in a production with 44 credited crew members.

The film drew strong notices from critics, whose rating of 8.2/10 across 137 reviews is markedly higher than audience scores of 6.7/10 on IMDb and 6.2/10 on TMDB, where vote counts of roughly 6,300 and 214 respectively are modest. That gap suggests a work valued more by professional viewers than by the broader public.