Omen
Directed by Baloji
Written by Baloji & Thomas van Zuylen
Starring Marc Zinga, Yves-Marina Gnahoua, Marcel Otete Kabeya, Eliane Umuhire
Unrated
Runtime: 90 minutes

by Clayton Hayes, Staff Writer

Omen is the feature directorial debut by Belgian multi-hyphenate Baloji, and it’s easy to see why it’s making waves: Having won Cannes’ 2023 New Voice Prize, it’s just wrapped up screenings as part of the New Directors/New Films 2024 slate. It was also Belgium’s submission to the 2023 Academy Awards. Omen is exploring the cultural legacy of Belgian colonialism in Central Africa, though its approach is far from conventional.

On paper, Omen is an incisive family drama about a son returning to Kinshasa after living for years in Belgium, but at its heart it’s a film about people struggling with marginalization. All four protagonists - Koffi (Zinga), his sister Tshala (Umuhire), their mother Mama Mujila (Gnahoua), and local street urchin Paco (Kabeya), given title card treatment at various points in the film, find their lives cast about by the whims of a society in which they’ve had no say. This isn’t anything like new ground, but the genius of Baloji and van Zuylen’s screenplay is the way in which it variously reveals and withholds information as the film progresses.

As we–the audience–watch the characters speak, interact, orbit around each other, we have to sit with the discomfort of their idiosyncrasies and relationships without character beats to provide rationale or clarity. Why does Mama Mujila seem so resentful of Koffi, so quick to believe he’s ill-intentioned? Why does Tshala seem more comfortable with Koffi’s outsider status when all of their other sisters follow in Mama Mujila’s footsteps? Why is Koffi so intent on appeasing his family when they treat him so poorly? Why does Paco and his gang wear pink dresses and what the heck is his deal anyway? Omen gives us answers to all of these questions, or at least parts of answers, but it does so at its own pace.

That Omen is able to pull this off successfully speaks to the attention it’s been receiving, but also to the plaudits for Baloji as a new director, though the reason for the latter might not be immediately clear. It isn’t a flashy film in terms of its direction, and obviously a lot of the structure of the way characters are revealed is down to the screenplay. However, without a strong directorial hand to facilitate the work done by the actors, a film that relies on the gradual revealing of four interwoven character arcs would fall apart.

This is best exemplified, in my mind, by the thread of the plot that follows Paco, the most opaque of the film’s “main characters.” He’s introduced as the leader (denoted by a cheap plastic tiara) of a gang of pink dress-clad teens and pre-teens called the Goonz, dealing prescription drugs out of an abandoned school bus. At a base level, the excellent costume design (another role Baloji stepped into for Omen, along with Elke Hoste) meant that the Goonz stood out even against the backdrop of a wild Easter parade/wrestling match. Even more deeply, though, the reason behind the pink-dress-as-uniform, and why the Goonz carried a pink coffin painted with the name “Maya,” are central to Paco’s character and are only resolved much later in the film.

Paco is also the “main character” who is least willing (or perhaps least able) to put up with the fundamentally unfair society he finds himself in. He’s far younger than Koffi, Tshala, and Mama Mujila, seeming to be barely into his teens, and so hasn’t settled into the uncomfortable truce that the adults have with life and its inherent inconsistencies. Paco’s existence is also the most precarious of the four; though the adults are all marginalized in their own ways, they all have familial connections to fall back on. Paco only has the Goonz, the Goonz only have each other, and an abandoned bus is the closest they have to a permanent residence. That’s why, when a rival gang begins to cut away at the few unspoken rules tying his world together, Paco comes completely unmoored.

Omen is Kabeya’s first film credit, at least the only one on IMDB as I’m writing this, and his performance as Paco is hard to turn away from. I’m not aware of his background but, regardless, it’s an incredible amount of emotional depth for a young actor to take on. This is, again, where I think Baloji’s talent as a director shines through. I don’t want to diminish Kabeya’s contribution at all, but his is not the only noteworthy performance in Omen. That all of the actors are on the same page, and are working at such a high level, in a film as emotionally complex as Omen clearly points to a director who knows what they are doing. Gnahoua’s Mama Mujila is another perfect example: her disapproval of Koffi is so palpable that it might feel cartoonish if not handled delicately. And when, towards the end of the film, a glimpse into her character’s past is provided, this semi-sympathetic turn would not work if Gnahoua wasn’t able to play it as well as she does.

Some of the film’s themes are less readable to me, feeling more specific to the post-colonial relationship between Belgium and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but I didn’t find it detracted from my enjoyment of Omen in the least. In some cases, in fact, I felt it helped me identify with Koffi as an outsider returning to a culture that was no longer familiar. In an early scene, Koffi and his Belgian fiancée Alice (Lucie Debay) discuss the Swahili lessons he’s been taking, only to see this fall flat the first time he has to ask for directions in Kinshasa. Only later did I learn that Lingala is the primary alternative to French in Kinshasa, and that Swahili is more associated with the eastern parts of the DRC. As is the case with most people in Western Europe and North America, I think, Swahili is one of few African languages I’ve heard of, so I didn’t think to question Koffi’s (possible) mistake.

In a later scene, as Koffi is riding the bus to a nearby coal mine in one of his many failed attempts to meet up with his father, one of the Goonz’s rival gangs rides by on bicycles. An older mine worker notices their leopard print and comments on the sorry state of the country that even those too young to remember him are missing “le dictateur” (the dictator). For someone more familiar with the DRC’s history than I am, the gang’s black outfits and leopard-print toques would be immediate signifiers. Koffi and Alice see the gang’s leader, Simba, in their first visit to the mine, in fact, and I wonder if the meaning of his outfit was evident to either of them. This, though, is only scratching the surface of cultural specificity that underpins the scene between Koffi and the mine worker. The worker speaks Swahili but is evidently not from the DRC (or nearby Republic of the Congo) and, when referring to Mobutu as “the dictator,” switches to French.

Anyway, if I have one complaint about Omen it’s a common one for early-career filmmakers: it feels much longer than its 90 minutes. Baloji’s only other writing credit on IMDB is for a 2018 short, and his co-writer Thomas van Zuylen isn’t much more experienced. I found myself getting restless at about the one hour mark but, as I hope is obvious from the rest of this review, Omen was definitely worth sticking with. In fact, be sure to stick around for at least the beginning of the credits. The way that the film’s five principal characters are credited is one of the coolest things I’ve seen on a screen so far this year.