Omen

The director’s gift for unpacking the way notions of witchcraft can function as fig leaves for trauma, combined with his obvious eye for costumes, lighting, and framing, make for a visually striking, deeply compassionate, and memorable debut.

Makes up for any narrative patchiness with a bevy of unforgettable images and an attendant sense of ancient beliefs and rituals that divide as much as they unite.

Omen excellently captures the feelings of both cultural and generational alienation. In script and performance, there is never a moment of certainty.

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.

Baloji has constructed four fascinating characters, played persuasively by these performers, but trying to figure out where their arcs overlap, even faintly, too often distracts from the beauty before us.

The patchwork structure of Omen is suited to the complexity 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.

The film’s frenetic world-building eventually becomes numbing, in part because the uneven human dramas — each one offers a vague message about marginalization — lose momentum in all the commotion.