So this movie is set in Senegal[1], and it starts off with a bunch of construction workers (who are working on a giant luxury tower) unsuccessfully demanding that they be paid the months of back-pay they’re owed. From there, we follow one of them, Souleiman, as he meets up with his girlfriend, Ada, who is engaged to be married to a rich guy (who I think is the son of the rich guy who is building the tower) in a handful of days, and it’s not really clear if this is going to be a movie about a love triangle or economic inequality, but the answer turns out to be “both, and not in the way you’re thinking.”

SPOILERS FOLLOW after this, and this is a 2019 movie that’s on Netflix, so maybe you care?

Because the thing is, Souleiman leaves on a boat with a bunch of the other workers, to try to go to Spain to find better jobs that actually will pay them… and then there’s a big storm, and Ada is terrified that he’s lost, and goes through with her wedding to the rich guy super-unhappy.

And then weird stuff starts happening. There’s a fire in her new bed, with no apparent cause. And then blank-eyed women start going to the rich tower builder’s house at night to demand the three months’ pay they’re owed, and it is effectively creepy.

And so we follow Ada as she’s investigated by the police for suspicion that Souleiman really wasn’t on the boat and set the fire, and she’s hiding him. But as it goes on, the weird events become less deniable, and the investigator himself gets pulled into them (and realizes that he’d already been pulled into them), and it’s ultimately a kind of ghost story about both love and economic injustice.

Which is to say, it’s not like much else that’s out there. It’s moody and intense and its characters are richly portrayed, and there’s a reason that this was appearing on a bunch of “best of 2019” lists. Highly recommended.

(Also, despite the presence of ghosts, Emperor Palpatine does not appear in this movie.)

  1. I was originally going to say that it’s a Senegalese movie, but while its director, Mati Diop, is the niece of Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambéty (his Touki Bouki was on the S&S list), she was born and raised in Paris after her Senegalese father moved there in adulthood. So I guess maybe it’s a French movie? ↩︎