‘Omen’ Review: Arresting Belgian-Congolese Debut Probes a Family Riven by Superstition
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At first glance, “Omen” appears to be another entry in the long tradition of immigrant narratives dedicated to the old adage that you can’t go home again. Returning to the country of his birth, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Belgian resident Koffi (Marc Zinga) finds himself not just a stranger in a strange land, but a pariah in his own family. But things are more nuanced than that in this hazy, head-turning first feature from Belgian-Congolese rapper-turned-filmmaker Baloji: The deeper it delves into and across Koffi’s tortured family history, the clearer it becomes that his homeland was never a home to him at all. In “Omen,” cultural tradition is as much a force in dividing families as the gentrifying pull of the west, though Baloji lets viewers draw their own political conclusions amid a mist of vividly realized folklore.
A boldly outward-looking pick from Belgium as the country’s Best International Feature Oscar submission — and a special Un Certain Regard prizewinner at Cannes, where the film premiered in May — “Omen” announces its writer-director as an artist of significant formal imagination and daring, unafraid to put standard narrative legibility at risk in favor of intuitive sensory suggestion. Such gambles largely pay off, even if the joins between the film’s four chapters, each driven by a separate individual at odds with local society and superstition, aren’t all that elegant: At a fleet 91 minutes, “Omen” could stand a little more character-building. But the larger atmospheric payoff lingers; the film first gets under the skin, then sits in the skeleton like a trapped, restive spirit.
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We first encounter Koffi at his home in Belgium, instructing his reluctant white fiancée Alice (Lucie Debay) to fell his resplendent natural Afro with clippers, ahead of their joint visit to his family in Congo. The hairdo that marks his African identity in Europe would not, as it turns out, meet with his elders’ approval in Africa itself; it’s merely the first indication of Koffi’s anxious liminal state between cultures, forever othered on either continent. As a newborn, his unusual birthmark was branded a “zabolo” (mark of the devil) by his fearful, tradition-bound mother Mujila (a magnetic Yves-Marina Gnahoua), and its attendant associations with sorcery eventually saw him driven out of the family, all the way to Europe.
With Alice now pregnant with their first children — twins — he returns seeking reconciliation and repaired family ties, at least partly at Alice’s behest: “I wonder how we can love when we haven’t learned,” she lectures him, with the condescending sanctimony of one whose own cultural identity has never been challenged. But the trip is a disaster from the get-go. Koffi’s father, a laborer in the local mines, persistently avoids seeing him, while Mujila will only meet outside her home; a frosty reunion lunch devolves into hysteria when Koffi suffers an ordinary nosebleed, interpreted by his relatives as further evidence of his devilry. Only his progressive-minded sister Tshala (Eliane Umuhire, the radiant Rwandan star of “Neptune Frost” and “Birds Are Singing in Kigali”) is welcoming, not least because she has been exiled from the old family too. Plans to move to South Africa with her promiscuous younger boyfriend are afoot; Mujila is aghast that her daughter is “going to live with white Africans.”
From this taut setup, Baloji’s script splinters and drifts — not dully so, as its structural leaps and loops reflect the characters’ unresolved place in the world, though their perspectives do gradually recede from us. In their respective chapters, Koffi and Tshala each submit to abusive traditional faith-healing rituals, their desire for familial assimilation and acceptance ultimately trumping their worldly resistance. When, in the final segment, focus shifts to Mujila, we learn of the upbringing that molded her suspicious, unforgiving parenting, as the iron-spined resolve of Gnahoua’s standout performance gives way to shattered mourning.
A fourth strand centered on an unrelated figure, enterprising young tough Paco (Marcel Otete Kabeya), never satisfyingly meshes with the other three — even as his sidewalk survival antics, supported by gang of fellow ruffians in rose-pink smocks, provide “Omen” with its most kinetic setpieces. (Chief among them, a swaggering street parade that pairs the fanciest footwork of Joachim Philippe’s agile, float-like-a-butterfly lensing with the brassiest excesses of Liesa Van der Aa’s restless melting-pot score.) Paco, like Koffi, has been cast out of society for suspected witchcraft; rather than fighting the superstition, however, he has taken possession of it, performing street magic for rapt-horrified onlookers. Baloji judges no character in this unhappy collective, though “Omen” plainly regards folk tradition — in all its seductive mystery, here illustrated in lush fantasy sequences marked by fuchsia-hued smoke and burning desert scarecrows — as a generational burden, inspiring as much prejudice as it does a sense of belonging.
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