I should start this review by confessing that I never feel more thoroughly American than when I’m watching something to do with the French legal system. A bald eagle screams across some chasm in my soul as I bite back the urge to cry, “Uh, objection? He’s asking about vibes!” The recent double-whammy of Saint Omer and the even-more-acclaimed Anatomy of a Fall, as you can imagine, has broken me. I need some apple pie and a baseball game. Or, at the very least, some old episodes of Boston Legal, where I can, you know, understand what the fuck is going on.

Even when I’m left baffled by who in this film’s trial is allowed to ask what, however, I’m left rapt by Saint Omer. Alice Diop’s restrained-yet-captivating drama–inspired by a real-life case–centers on Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda), a young Senegalese immigrant who committed the passive, chilling infanticide of leaving her baby on the beach where the tide could take her away. There’s very little doubt about the sequence of events, and Laurence’s trial begins with her admitting she did indeed knowingly kill her child. But, she says, she’s still pleading not guilty: she did it, yes, but even she doesn’t understand why, so she feels that she can’t possibly bear sole responsibility.

Does Laurence truly believe she was cursed, or did the detective who questioned her accidentally plant the seed of this particular defense? She claims to have repeatedly called clairvoyants, but none of them admit to knowing her, and her phone bill shows no record of these calls. This alone could provide enough substance for a complex, meaty drama, but Diop treats it as only the flashiest of her spinning plates. When Laurence is backed into a corner and retreats into silence, is that silence an admission of guilt or just a weary surrender? Were her lies deliberate deceptions, or were they just attempts to shore up an already-collapsing sense of self-worth?

That last question is one we could ask of almost everyone in the film, really. Laurence’s much-older boyfriend, Luc (Xavier Maly), white and French, presents himself as sort of genially helpless, as if he’s a bit shabby and overwhelmed but, above all, harmless. He has an answer for every accusation Laurence levels at him, but while most of them sound reasonable enough, they make up an unsettling whole. It’s convenient, isn’t it, that he somehow managed to just shyly stammer his way into a young girlfriend no one ever sees and a daughter the government isn’t even aware of? Fine, he didn’t want to rock the boat by asking to bring Laurence to his older daughter’s wedding–but no one forced him to ask Laurence to cook for this wedding she couldn’t even attend. He did that on his own. But, like Laurence, even he may not know why he did these things; not letting himself think critically about his actions, especially when he can still change them, is a form of self-protection, and one that pairs well with his more privileged, insulated life. Laurence says that she hopes the trial will reveal her to herself, in a sense–Luc, you feel, would rather not know. To some extent, the trial exposes him as, at the very least, a coward. That revelation hurts him … but it’s easy to imagine how he’ll soon cocoon himself away from it, helpless and hapless once again.

The witness to all of this–to some extent our surrogate, but really more Diop’s surrogate–is Rama (Kayije Kagame), a literary professor and writer who is second-generation French-Senegalese. Her part of the story feels a little underdeveloped, and Kagame isn’t quite as impressive as Malanda, who draws in attention like a gravity well. But even if this side of the film is slightly weaker, it still feels like a necessary part of the whole.

Rama comes to the trial as a kind of elevated scavenger, looking to use Laurence Coly’s story as the raw material for her retelling of Medea. When she has lunch with Laurence’s mother without revealing this, there’s a prickle of justified unease. But even if Rama wants to be a distant, cold-blooded observer stripping this drama for parts she can use, she can’t be: she’s tied to it. It’s not just that she’s one of the few other Black faces in the courtroom–though that’s reason enough for Laurence’s mother to pick her out and try to befriend her. It’s that she also moves through the world with some sense of Laurence’s intensely controlled loneliness. She has intimate experience with the academic system that treated Laurence as more of a curiosity than a student. Most of all, she has a mother–and in another few months, she’ll be a mother. She’s not just watching to learn why Coly did what she did, she’s watching, ultimately, to try to understand what she will do, what she will experience. What, in fact, she may be experiencing right now.

Saint Omer is streaming on Hulu.