The Brooklyn Rail

Congolese-Belgian rapper, actor, and filmmaker Baloji’s first feature, Omen elevates a dizzying storytelling full of magical realism, chromatic punch, rituals, and cultural superimpositions. Distinguished at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, the film was shown at MoMA's New Directors/New Films ahead of a planned US distribution this year.

First-time parents-to-be Koffi (Marc Zinga) and Alice (Lucie Debay) are expecting twins. They want to celebrate their happy event with Koffi’s family living in the Democratic Republic of Congo. But after an eighteen-year absence and with a pregnant white wife in tow, Koffi’s homecoming to honor traditions reopens old, intimate wounds.

As Koffi and Alice join an outdoor lunch to meet the rest of the family, they receive a lukewarm welcome fraught with malaise, timid curiosity, and unspoken feelings. The couple faces empty chairs, where Koffi’s parents were expected to sit. The father is nowhere to be seen, while the mother, Mujila (Yves-Marina Gnahoua), barely engages with the couple. This tension culminates when Koffi, holding an infant in his arms, lets his nose bleed unto the child, exposing a taboo. Koffi, owing to a distinctive birthmark on his cheek associated with the touch of the devil, is considered a “zabolo” or an evil sorcerer; he’s believed to have cursed the baby. Although his frequent nosebleeds are blood pressure related, Koffi submits to a traditional ceremony comprising a local priest, masks, dances, and chants to appease the spirits. No amount of elaborate rituals will be enough for him to transcend stigma and rejection, and a shocked Alice wonders if someone who hasn’t experienced love is able to love in return.

The film illuminates the potency of the occult in modern life while exploring the difficulty of extricating oneself from the weight of the past. Structured in four parts named after four different characters, Omen patches various short stories together to create a mosaic of lives affected by magical beliefs. After Koffi, we encounter Paco (Marcel Otete Kabeya), a feisty and hardened street boy who grieves his sister’s mysterious death while competing with other gangs. Perhaps in her memory, he and the rest of his gang dress in pink garments and adopt gender fluid identities. Paco has seizures, and we guess that, like Koffi, he’s also a zabolo. We then turn to Tshala (Eliane Umuhire), Koffi’s sister who is about to immigrate to South Africa. Engaged in a polyamorous relationship, Tshala suspects she has contracted a sexually transmitted infection. The last tale focuses on Mama Mujila, her backstory, and how she attempts to overcome loss in a patriarchal society.

Director and screenwriter Baloji, whose name means “sorcerer,” has given a fantastical, dramatic, and humorous tint to his film. We experience all these elements in the opening scenes in which a witch rides a brown horse in an arid area populated by scarecrows and, upon reaching a shore, pumps cloudy lavender breast milk into a body of water. This dreamlike sequence is immediately followed by Alice awkwardly shaving Koffi’s afro in their European home before setting off to the Democratic Republic of Congo, where Koffi struggles to speak his native language, long forgotten in his self-imposed exile. This detail is likely inspired by Baloji’s own experience of leaving Congo to settle in Belgium at a young age. Magic here acts as a device to conjure fears and trauma.

The stories are united by a theme—the four characters overcome their differences in solidarity—and each tale visually borrows from the genre of fairy tales. Mythical creatures, such as mermaids, even appear in the film. Costumes and color schemes make further aesthetic connections across the narratives. Koffi’s other three siblings appear like eccentric godmothers or cunning sisters in their matching updos and ensembles of vivid blue, green, and purple dresses. This contrasts with Tshala’s shaven head and minimal make-up. In her traditional ceremony, Tshala reenacts cosmological myths of fertility with her partner; they embrace on the floor with their bodies painted in tribal prints and dust.

The resonance between the present and a mythological, fictional past is also explored in more phantasmagorical scenes. Reminiscent of the Brothers Grimm’s Hansel and Gretel, Paco is lost in the bush with his sister when they stumble across a candy hut and an evil witch. Similar to the German tale, the child-eating witch feeds the two siblings to fatten them, but, alas, Paco is unable to save his sister. He grabs her pink dress and tiara as he escapes from the rising pink smoke coming from the hut.

Omen is fundamentally a story of spiritual culture(s)—Western, tribal, Christian. Koffi and Alice land in the Democratic Republic of Congo on Palm Sunday, one of the significant time stamps that ordain the three other segments, taking place during the Holy Week and with a six-month time jump. This chronological course provides an additional layer of meaning to the events unfolding. Koffi’s return on the day that the Christ is said to have entered Jerusalem points to personal sacrifice in suffering a fate of injustice. Koffi accepts his undesirable status, rather than arguing with his family against the irrationality of their beliefs.

Later, in September (coinciding with the Nativity of Mary), Mama Mujila bonds with Tshala over the way that society treats women, giving her blessing to her daughter’s wish to leave the Congo. During a cinematographically stunning scene in which the women of the family turn into prolific wailers to accompany Mujila’s grief, the mother’s profile is half lit, with a brightness coming from above. She stoically sits among them, and, when they latch onto her body amid rising water levels, the image evokes devotional art of the Virgin Mary, a mix of the Pietà (without a corpse) and Assumption subjects meet The Raft of the Medusa (Théodore Géricault, 1818–19).

For all its originality, Omen’s four parts often feel like separate shorts rather than strands that fully weave together. Koffi and Paco meet off screen; we miss their first interaction, which could have shed light on their shared experience of being outcasts. We also lack insight into how Koffi and Alice navigate being a biracial couple and the extent to which Koffi’s return may have transformed them individually and as lovers. Koffi’s father, a miner always sought out but absent, remains out of reach. The image of the mine, with its towering mount and invisible depths, is visually ominous, but it fails to provide more than spectacular scenery.

The film adopts discontinuous narrative choices to underscore how one world encroaches another. In doing so, it does, at times, favor the (magnificent) aestheticism of Congolese street parades and occultist ceremonies—Baloji’s love of fashion and investigation of synesthesia are evident—at the expense of further exploring the human cost of assignation and uprooting oneself from home to survive.