Dahomey (2024)
I went into Dahomey completely blind, and the subject matter alone was enough to get me genuinely excited. The repatriation of 26 royal artefacts from France back to Benin, some 130 years after they were looted during colonial conquest. That's a story with real weight behind it, the kind of historical reckoning that deserves to be told rigorously and with emotional intelligence. Mati Diop, whose debut feature Atlantics I found genuinely striking in its blend of the political and the poetic, clearly has the instincts for ambitious, unconventional filmmaking. So I was ready to be moved. What I got instead was two hours of bubble wrap.
That's perhaps a touch uncharitable, but only a touch. Diop makes the bold, genuinely interesting decision to narrate the film largely from the first-person perspective of the artefacts themselves. A centuries-old wooden statue ponders its own displacement, its voice low and dreamlike, addressing the audience directly. For the first twenty minutes or so, it works. There's something genuinely haunting about giving voice to objects that have spent generations in foreign glass cases, stripped of context and community. It's an imaginative way into the material, and I was with it.
Then the packing begins. And it goes on. And on. Long, dialogue-free stretches of museum staff carefully wrapping these treasures in protective foam, loading them into crates, transporting them to a plane. I understand what Diop is reaching for here, a kind of meditative, observational patience that asks you to sit with the weight of the moment. But watching freight logistics play out in near-silence for ten-plus minutes at a stretch doesn't create contemplative depth. It creates restlessness. The pacing doesn't just slow down, it grinds to a near-complete stop, and no amount of stylistic intentionality quite rescues it from feeling like a very long wait for something that never quite arrives.
What's genuinely frustrating is how much is left unexplored. For a film built around one of the more significant acts of colonial restitution in recent memory, you come away knowing remarkably little. How were these objects taken in the first place? What do they specifically mean to the people of Benin beyond a general sense of pride and loss? What happens next, practically and culturally? Diop skims over all of it. There is a university debate sequence towards the end that briefly crackles with the kind of contested, passionate discussion the whole film could have used more of. Young Beninese students argue about what repatriation really means, whether 26 objects out of thousands is justice or a gesture. It's alive in a way the rest of the film simply isn't. But it feels parachuted in from a different, more rigorous documentary, entirely disconnected from the hypnotic drift of everything that precedes it.
Thinking about the tradition of African filmmaking that Diop is working within, films like Black Girl, which confronts the violence of colonial displacement with devastating directness, you can see the lineage Diop is drawing from. But where that film burns with a precise, furious clarity, Dahomey opts for a kind of dreamy remove that keeps you at arm's length from the very thing it's trying to make you feel.
I don't think Diop is without talent, far from it. The film is visually polished, and the central conceit shows genuine creative ambition. But ambition and execution are two different things, and here they pull in opposite directions. The art-house approach ends up smothering the historical story rather than illuminating it. If you're specifically in the mood for slow, contemplative cinema that prioritises atmosphere over argument, you might find something here. But for anyone hoping to actually understand the true weight of what colonial restitution means, its history, its politics, its emotional and cultural stakes, this is a real letdown.
Two stars.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 2024 | Watched: 2026-07-21
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: MUBI · MUBI Amazon Channel
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: MUBI · MUBI Amazon Channel
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Fandango At Home
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Fandango At Home
Physical: Amazon US
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