I left (and, indeed, sat through) Saint Omer distinctly unimpressed. A journalist attends a court case in which a woman is accused of having killed her young baby by leaving her for the tide to take away. The film in its vast majority takes place in the courtroom, the accused and the witnesses being interrogated and cross-examined, the judges making their judgements. No one could doubt the verisimilitude of it (to a distracting degree as Claire Mathon’s cinematography, reliant on the natural light coming into the courtroom, is uneven and inconsistent), but you’re left with a very dry film in which people discuss the same event over and over to an unending degree, with the occasional reference to whether the mother being black has any impact on the event. At one point, towards the end, a cardinal sin is committed as the defence delivers literally to camera a closing argument which is just stating the subtext of the film out loud. The whole thing is muddled and underbaked, with no real attempt at integrating the point it is so desperately trying to make into the film itself, and no real attempt at justifying or interrogating that point through cinema.