Mark Reviews Movies: SALOUM

Saloum, IFC Films/Shudder

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 1, 2022

A trio of mercenaries, known by rumor and legend as heroes throughout Africa, find themselves in a series of difficult situations—some of them manmade, such as the various conflicts in which they have participated over the years, and at least one of them beyond human understanding. That's the basic setup of writer/director Jean Luc Herbulot's Saloum, an efficient but ultimately shallow movie that's divided into two, mostly effective parts that never form a satisfactory whole.

The Bangui Hyenas, that team of hired guns, are made up of Chaka (Yann Gael), Rafa (Roger Sallah), and Minuit (Mentor Ba). At the story's start, they have found a Mexican drug lord named Felix (Renaud Farah) in a Guinea-Bissau that's in upheaval due to a military coup in 2003. Felix offers the three a briefcase filled with gold bricks in exchange for a trip to safety on their plane, but when said plane starts losing fuel on account of sabotage, the mercenaries land in Senegal, take a trip to a remote commune, and are offered shelter by its leader Omar (Bruno Henry).

The first part is a battle of wits of sorts, as the mercenaries hide their identities and true intentions from Omar and other people at the commune. A couple of complications emerge in the plan, namely Awa (Evelyne Ily Juhen), a deaf and mute woman who's aware of the real story of the men, and Souleymane (Ndiaga Mbow), a police captain who arrives later. That's because he's preparing a team of cops to arrest the mercenaries and the man they're transporting when the time is right.

Chaka has to convince Omar to get the fuel and resin the team needs to leave. After swapping stories about the various wars in which they have participated with his host, though, Chaka realizes he knows this man—and violently reveals what his plan has been all along.

None of this, unfortunately, matters in the long run, because one grounded twist involving Chaka's nightmarish past leads to another—albeit one that's far from grounded in the reality of conflict and the leader's history as a child soldier. A supernatural threat, the spirits of an old kingdom who take the fluid form of swarms of insects and attack their victims' senses, emerges.

Just as with the game of subterfuge and tension involving the mercenaries' presence in the camp, the movie's second half more or less works on its own. The visual effects, as those masses of insects stalk and pounce while taking vaguely human shape, are quite good, and the performances, particularly from Gael and Juhen, tap into a sturdy and tough attitude that matches Herbulot's simple but confident sense of style.

These are, though, two very different stories. While Hurbulot's screenplay attempts to connect them by some ambling themes of revenge and fate, the narrative of Saloum is too rushed to make those plot and thematic connections stick.

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