Omen Review: A Magical-Realist Patchwork of a Family Caught Between Past and Future

In Omen, one fractured family attempts to reconcile two irreconcilable yet inextricable realities, that of the Republic of the Congo and its one-time colonial possessor, Belgium. In his feature directorial debut, Belgian-Congolese rapper Baloji avoids romanticizing either, preferring to depict their uneasy relation as it manifests in family squabbles.

The film is broken up into four sections, each with their own mood and color palette, titled after the central characters: Koffi (Marc Zinga), Paco (Marcel Otete Kabeya), Tshala (Eliane Umuhire), and Mujila (Yves-Marina Gnahoua). These sections intersect one another, though Koffi remains the overall protagonist. Ostracized for a port-wine stain birthmark that his family sees as a sign of evil sorcery, he returns from Belgium to the Congo after many years, hoping to obtain his parents’ blessing to marry Alice (Lucie Debay), his white Belgian fiancée, who’s pregnant with twins. From the outset, nothing goes as planned.

Omen makes much of Koffi’s cognitive dissonance, as he finds himself caught between defiance and deference to traditions that he’s come to view as irrational, if not downright oppressive. This is conveyed through such devices as Koffi’s afro, which he shaves to avoid giving offense, and the wedding dowry. He and Alice have scrimped and saved to present this traditional gift to Koffi’s father, Abel (Romaine Ndomba), a coal miner, but when they aren’t exactly welcomed with open arms, Koffi struggles to decide what to do with the money.

The film’s next section introduces Paco, leader of a band of street kids fashioned as a cult of mourning for his dead sister, adapting her pink tutu and bedazzled tiara for their regalia. They’re engaged in a rivalry with another band in leopard-print toques, recalling the look of Mobutu Sese Seko, the former president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Initially, the conflict between the two bands of street kids plays out on the carnivalesque terrain of Mardi Gras processions, costume one-upmanship, and wrestling matches, before taking a violent turn. This is the loosest plot thread in the fabric of the film, though the motif of the wrestling match, straddling the line between festive mock combat and all-too-real antipathy, becomes a fitting image for the family dynamic as well the Congo’s postcolonial situation.

Tshala, Koffi’s sister, takes center stage in the third section. The only family member who sympathizes with Koffi, she has troubles of her own. She’s in a polygamous relationship with a South African man who contracts an STI from unprotected sex. While Koffi has escaped the family’s influence spatially, Tshala, despite or because of her proximity, has carved out her independence as a woman against significantly taller odds. Even so, she finds herself drawn into a healing ritual that neither she nor her partner place any faith in.

The final section of Baloji’s film takes place months after the third, in the days leading up to Abel’s funeral, and revolves around Koffi’s mother, Mujila. This section reveals deeper origins of her resentment for him and sets the stage for a new understanding between mother and son, even if reconciliation remains out of reach for them.

The patchwork structure of Omen is suited to the complexity of a setting where characters switch between French, Swahili, and English depending on who they want to keep in the dark. Yet it’s difficult to shake that there are too many threads for a film of this length to do them justice. No one section is sufficiently developed to stand on its own, and neither does the whole feel greater than the sum of its parts. The resulting incoherency may stress themes of fracture and irrationality, but it also leaves the characters too roughly sketched.

If this patchwork approach doesn’t quite come together in terms of plot, it serves Omen on a more granular editing level. The film conveys interiority by interjecting brief, tantalizing flashes of memory, dream, and fantasy. The telltale presence of clouds the disconcerting shade of Pepto-Bismol announces the irreality of these visions, which nonetheless affect or even dictate the characters’ decisions. The handling of Abel, who we only ever see in a single close-up of his mouth during one such flashback, points to another tack the film might have taken. Paradoxically, because of his near-total absence, Abel’s patriarchal authority casts a long shadow over the film. Perhaps Omen could have benefited from similarly implying, instead of dramatizing, much more of its unwieldy plot, opening up screentime to devote to the characters—Tshala and Alice especially—who have great potential but never get their due.