Halfway through “Omen,” a trippy ensemble drama set in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tshala (Eliane Umuhire) tries to reason with Alice (Lucie Debay), the white fiancé of her big brother Koffi (Marc Zinga). Alice, who lives with Koffi in Belgium, is justifiably overwhelmed: Her future in-laws refuse to acknowledge her existence, and, after Koffi accidentally bleeds from his nose onto an infant relative, he is nailed into a wooden mask as punishment.
“We’re in a different space-time continuum,” Tshala explains.
The director, Bajoli (a multidisciplinary artist and rapper whose name means “sorcerer” in Swahili), runs with this idea: that Congolese society, highly superstitious as it is, operates on another — frenzied, magical, gender-bending — wavelength.
The film fills out this wild world by navigating four loosely connected stories. There’s Koffi, who receives a bitter homecoming. Tshala is in a polyamorous relationship. Mujila (Yves-Marina Gnahoua), a menacing matriarch, is upended by her husband’s death. Finally, there’s Paco (Marcel Otete Kabeya), an orphan who leads a gang of tutu-wearing street kids — this thread, the most chaotic of the four, plays like a Grimms’ fairy tale about shantytown residents.
To say “Omen” is ambitious feels like an understatement. The film begins with a mystical interlude in which a woman pours her breast milk into a river, and sustains this vivid symbolism throughout, making details with natural explanations (a birthmark, a seizure) take on an otherworldly heft.
In its best moments, a quiet element of absurdity grounds the spectacle. We sense the fatigue and — because family is inescapable — weirdly amused resignation, such as when Tshala, giving a goblin’s smirk, assuages Alice. Otherwise, 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.
Omen
Not rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters.
