When I sat down to see Saloum, I knew I was in for a treat as soon as I read the introductory text: “Vengeance is a river whose bottom we can only reach by drowning,” and I was right. Saloum, directed by Jean-Luc Herbulot, is a genre-bending, twisted tale of revenge set in the African wild west.
The film takes place amidst the Guinea-Bissau coup d’état of 2003. Three mercenaries, Chaka (Yann Gael), Rafa (Roger Sallah), and Minuit (Mentor Ba), known as Bangui’s Hyenas, are hired to extract a Mexican drug lord, Felix (Renaud Farah), out of Guinea-Bissau, a country that shares a border with Senegal. Their mission is to fly Felix to Senegal’s capital, Dakar. While in the air, they discover a leak in their aircraft, and Chaka insists on making an emergency landing in a remote location called Sine-Saloum. The place is like a beach town, where they meet Omar (Bruno Henry), a man who owns a resort. Omar doesn’t kick people out of his resort because they don’t have money; instead, he requires them to perform daily chores in exchange for a room. The Other guests at the resort include a deaf-mute woman named Awa (Evelyne Ily Juhen) and a police officer from Dakar named Captain Souleymane (Ndiaga Mbow). In the meantime, Rafa and Minuit, in particular, start suspecting that Chaka is hiding something from them. In a brilliant dinner scene where everyone is seated, Awa, using sign language, shocks the Hyenas, who can also sign, by informing them she knows who they are and blackmails them into revealing it to the police officer unless they take her with them to Dakar. On the other hand, Souleymane eventually figures out that Chaka, Rafa, and Minuit are Bangui’s Hyenas, a group of criminals on the run, and plans to catch them.
When the movie reaches its halfway point, the revenge angle unexpectedly kicks in during another dinner scene. And when that happens, it only serves as the beginning of all the terrible things that will follow. The tone of the movie then switches to the supernatural subgenre. By getting revenge, “that character” unintentionally unleashes a long-suppressed evil, putting everyone’s lives at the resort in danger. The movie effectively explores the idea that even revenge has consequences. When you are hell-bent on exacting vengeance, your mind is overwhelmed by dark clouds of resentment that refuse to dissipate. These resentful thoughts drive you to do things that can have dire consequences, which is what happens to “that character” in this movie.
Screenwriters Jean Luc Herbulot and Pamela Diop skillfully and successfully conceal who desires vengeance and why. Even we, as viewers, forget about it because we are so engrossed in the story of the three mercenaries, which is compelling in and of itself. I was curious to see how the hyenas would have dealt with Awa and Souleymane and escaped Saloum with Felix before all hell broke loose. When the movie moved into the supernatural sub-genre, it was impressive that all the scary scenes were shot in broad daylight because they still managed to terrify me. In the same vein as other recent movies like Tumbbad (2018), Karnan (2021) and Kantara (2022), Saloum also uses local (African) mythology to explore a universal theme.
Jean-Luc Herbulot’s direction is bold, energetic, and highly stylized as he expertly combines a variety of genres, like westerns, horror, action, and fantasy, into a single 84-minute package of pleasure. Saloum is now available on Shudder. You can watch the trailer of the movie below.
Saloum movie link: IMDB
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