Congolese-born rapper, musician and film-maker Baloji (né Serge Baloji Tshiani) was a prizewinner at Cannes final 12 months with this function directing debut: a dynamic, teemingly populated, multistranded and tonally elusive image which I initially thought would profit from comparisons with Jordan Peele’s horror traditional Get Out. Actually, it’s extra difficult than that.
Koffi (Marc Zinga) is a Congolese man residing in Belgium and married to a white lady, Alice (Lucie Debay). They’re about to have twins and Koffi feels that he can not put it off any additional: no matter his household will assume, the couple should journey again to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to allow them to see Alice and allow them to get used to the thought. It significantly means propitiating his fiercely conservative mom Mujila (Yves-Marina Gnahoua). He takes care to shave off his westernised afro, and even brings them a monetary tribute, or “dowry”, of 1000’s of euros.
However at a tense welcome lunch (at which his father is mystifyingly not current), Alice learns that her husband’s childhood nickname was “zabolo”, or sorcerer, and when poor Koffi has a nosebleed and splatters blood over his sister’s child, the terrified household’s simmeringly xenophobic dislike of Koffi taking a white spouse explodes into irrational horror. Then and there, he’s dragged into an exorcism ceremony, supposedly to avoid wasting the harmless child from his evil eye, all this in entrance of the aghast Alice. It’s a preposterous however scary and humiliating ritual which Koffi should patiently endure in order to not make issues worse.
This weird scenario will not be handled with irony or black-comic horror however as a part of a posh, critical story. A second part explains the lifetime of a road child known as Paco, with whom Koffi and Alice cross paths and who’s traumatised by the demise of his child sister by the hands of a rival gang who have an effect on the leopardskin clothes and headgear of the late President Mobutu. (It’s the primary time I’ve seen this picture on the film display since Leon Gast’s documentary When We Have been Kings, in regards to the Ali/Foreman rumble within the jungle in what within the Nineteen Seventies was often known as Zaire.) One other phase explains the lifetime of Koffi’s equally alienated sister Tshala (Eliane Umuhire) who’s about to to migrate to South Africa along with her husband; they’ve an open relationship, however what her sisters name “this polyamory weirdness” has given her an STD. Lastly, Koffi and Tshala’s mom takes centre stage.
The entire idea of a culture-clash is questioned and undermined by Baloji; tradition, heritage, nationality and identification are all shapeshifting ideas right here. Maybe Omen doesn’t fully dangle collectively however it’s daring, dangerous, thrilling film-making.
