Critics reviews

Atlantics is not merely social realism. It is far richer, and far stranger, than that.

The sea beckons, seduces, overwhelms, and destroys in Atlantics, Mati Diop’s evocative, expansive ghost story set in Senegal.

In Atlantics Diop blends social realism with fantasy and horror into a boldly atmospheric production, a lyrical elegy equal parts mythic and phantasmagoric.

Magnificently transfixing, Diop’s ghost world is saturated with political implications, spiritual gravity, and subdued lyricism. Intermittently saturated in a soft spectral light, the nights in "Atlantics" teem with an aura ripe for the arrival of an apparition of love that’ll breed transformation.

It’s a suspenseful, sensual, exciting movie, and therefore a deeply haunting one as well.

Few recent films have changed direction as often and as unpredictably as Mati Diop’s Atlantics.

It’s a lot to handle in a debut feature but thanks to ambition, intelligence, and the desire to relate a story that is seldom told from the inside, Diop—aided by Claire Mathon’s hauntingly shadowed cinematography and composer Fatima Al Qadiri’s sinuous, dissonant score—pulls it off almost without a hitch.

Despite the considerable stylistic prowess demonstrated by Diop and her collaborators, Atlantics feels somewhat diffuse, building toward a decisive but familiar moment of closure for Ada—a note of affirmation to resolve the entire affair. Nonetheless, for Diop as much as for her lead character, Atlantics resounds with the promise of great things to come.

This new degree of polish notwithstanding, Diop retains a knack for creating lyric accents that seem to have been casually captured rather than sweated over.

The film balances its poetic images and trance-like mood with a tactile, visceral evocation of life.

Atlantics, a deserving winner of the runner-up Grand Prix at Cannes, synthesizes the intoxicating moods of Diop’s previous work into an oneiric fable of migration and transmigration—suspended between realism and fantasy, the living and the dead, here and elsewhere.

The short-form Atlantiques is broader, about the experience of young Senegalese men as they travel to Europe. The feature-length Atlantique drops the plural, narrowing its range to look at how these departures have shaped the life of a particular seventeen year-old girl. As Ada gazes back at the camera, we see how the seemingly minute can be the stuff of history too.