Exhausted Bodies & Spectral Return in Atlantique (2019)

by: Ylenia Olibet , February 6, 2024

In Mati Diop’s Atlantique (2019), the spirits of Senegalese immigrant boys, swallowed by the vast Atlantic Ocean as they try to migrate to Europe, return to solve their unfinished business. They vengefully haunt the exploitative employer who has not paid them at the beginning of the film, while also melancholically haunting the girlfriends they left behind. Unlike other films on recent immigration, Atlantique focuses on the perspective and the experience of those who are left in the homeland, notably the migrants’ girlfriends, thus privileging an intimate take on the consequence of the displacement of African migrants in the context of advanced global capitalism. By blending realism and the supernatural, and by reworking Third-world cinema filmic tradition as well as art-cinema aesthetics and generic global horror conventions, Mati Diop’s approach to filmmaking is political as far as it gives visibility to African immigration narratives outside of Western-centric frameworks of interpretation. She links them to longer histories of political and economic global uneven power relations that have marked black bodies as disposable.

Atlantique is in conversation with a political filmmaking tradition that in the 1960s and 1970s has explored the theme of exile and immigration, especially in the work of Senegalese filmmakers. Indeed, Atlantique combines the neorealist approach of Ousmane Sembène and the experimental, whimsical dimension of Djibril Mambety Diop’s films. As with several other recent films from Africa, Atlantique ‘call[s] upon the conventional modes of representations of Africans’ responding to the ‘ugliest faces of globalisation’ (Harrow and Garritano 2019: 7). It does this by focusing on the gendered experience and consequences of the attempt by Senegalese youths to cross the ocean to get to the Global North, and through the stylistic and narrative use of the supernatural. As such, Atlantique, a French-Senegal co-production, participates in several trends characterising contemporary African filmmaking which have shaped current approaches to the study of cinema from this continent (Diawara 2010, Harrow and Garritano 2019).

Such new directions in the study of African cinema take into account the shifting landscape of film industries in the continent addressing issues of technologies of production, distribution and exhibition (Thackway 2003, Okome 2007b, Lobato 2012). At a thematic and stylistic level, new scholarship on African cinema addresses the emergence of films that respond to pressing issues brought about by globalisation (Thackway 2014, 2019), while considering their disparate contexts of circulation, namely within commercial cinema—i.e. Nollywood—(Krings & Okome 2013) and film festivals (Bisschoff 2009). Within studies of African cinema, scholars have particularly tackled the recurrent presence of horror, the occult, and monsters in Nollywood (Okome 2007a). Anthropological readings have contextualised such cinematic presence of monsters in Nollywood films within the larger ‘obsession … with the disquieting figure of the zombie’ stemming from South Africa (Comaroff and Comaroff. 2022, 782) as a reaction and a response to economic disparities brought about by neoliberal capitalism. Given this context, a study of Atlantique, simultaneously an ‘art-film’ awarded with the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019 and a commercial success circulating globally on Netflix (Enzerink 2021), contributes to and expands the scholarly investigations and interpretations of the recourse of the supernatural in African filmmaking.

The first time I watched the film I affiliated its ghostly story of immigration, haunting, and return to a cinematic global horror tradition that has re-elaborated the zombi of Haitian folklore into a monstrous figure allegorizing the exhaustion of bodies under capitalism (Shaviro 2002). With their questioning of boundaries between life and death, between body and mind, cinematic zombies have progressively acquired a rebellious connotation, pushing the colonial construction of the Haitian zombi as a ferocious rebelling slave (Vint 2017). My association of the returning boys in Atlantique with cinematic zombies depends on their monstrous and nightmarish embodiment in the bodies of their girlfriends, marked by sweat, vacant eyes, and putrefying blisters, wandering at night in Dakar as a zombie hoard. However, these monstrous figures in the films are not zombies, but djiins, spirits of the Muslim tradition, usually unseen by humans, but capable of assuming various forms. Indeed, Mati Diop has never mentioned western generic film horror conventions nor zombies films as a visual and narrative source of her film. Yet, the critical discourse around the film, both in scholarly publications (Adair 2022, Galt 2022), film journalism (Tremblay 2019), and cinephilic reviews (Weston 2019), often intertextually contextualises Atlantique’s ghostly possession within the longer cinematic zombie tradition in order to bring forward the film’s postcolonial critique of labour conditions in advanced global capitalism.

In particular, Rosalind Galt has explained the mechanics of possession in Atlantiques with reference to jinns and fabu rab – ancestral spirits of local Senegalese animist tradition (2022: 98), but she has also invited to see the spirits in Atlantiques ‘within the transnational circulation of resistance to colonialism through the imaginaries of indigenous animism,’ thinking in particular of the ‘zombie, the figure of slavery’s dead labour who comes after those who have stolen his body’ (2022: 99). Yasmina Price has also noted how in Atlantique ‘the possessed women find kinship with cinematic renderings of zombies’ which ‘align[s] Diop’s feature film … with the generic category of black horror’ (2003: 58). The mixing of fantastical elements rooted in West African, Islamic religious traditions, and Euro-Western cinematic horror conventions, which denotes Diop’s ‘transcultural sensibility’ (Price 2023: 58), gestures toward transnational and transhistorical connections between Europe and Africa currently characterised by the uneven power relations of global capitalism, which are the legacy of precedent colonial relations.

In my video essay, I have decided to use split-screen to compare the initial ‘realist’ sequences of the film with some of the most supernatural sequences from the middle of the film. On the one hand, we have a construction site, the labourers that work in it, and their fight reclaiming their salaries; on the other, we see the spirits of the drowned men returning and possessing the bodies of the livings, from the initial illness of the possession to the transformation into a hoard of possessed bodies that walk by night through Dakar.  The sound alternates between the diegetic sound from the sequence on the right and the one from the left. The comparison thus provides a formal analysis of the film: if narratively, the explicit supernatural twist of the plot only becomes evident towards the latter half of the film, visually and aurally a spectral and apocalyptic mood connotes the film diegesis from the very beginning. This is the basis of the film’s antirealist aesthetics and political project of anti-colonial critique that occurs through the blurring of lines between clear-cut ‘realism’ and ‘horror’.

By bringing forward the young men’s condition as ‘living-deads’ even before they become supernatural creatures possessing (in the double sense of ghostly embodiment or making love) their girlfriends, I point to the larger critique of exploitative labour conditions in global capitalism made by the film. The nightmarish and hazy atmosphere of the construction site where the young men work and are exhausted also highlights a stubbornness in fighting for their rights that suggests they are ‘in a state of injury, in a phantom-like world of horrors and intense cruelty and profanity’ (Mbembe 2003:21, his emphasis).