Critical response
On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes website, the film has an approval rating of 99% based on 81 reviews, with an average rating of 8.2/10. The website's critics consensus reads: "With a rigorous yet fantastical approach, Mati Diop's Dahomey provocatively uncovers the restitution and repatriation of a stolen legacy, and serves as a powerful statement for decolonization." [35] On Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 85 out of 100 based on 23 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim". [36]
On the AlloCiné, which lists 27 press reviews, the film obtained an average rating of 4.1/5. [37]
David Rooney reviewing the film for The Hollywood Reporter described it as "Richly layered and resonant", and opined: "This directorial flourish liberates the looted treasures from being mere objects, with smart use of subjective camera by DP Joséphine Drouin-Viallard helping to make them come alive as characters." [38]
E. Nina Rothe, writing for the International Cinephile Society , noted that the film "is important, with its message crucial to restitution providing the beginning of righting the wrongs of colonialism". [39]
Wendy Ide wrote in ScreenDaily while reviewing the film at Berlinale, "In this agile, cerebral film, using a combination of deft fly-on-the-wall footage, a centrepiece debate among students at the University of Abomey-Calavi and an unexpected element of fantasy, the film feels like an important contribution to an ongoing conversation about the legacy of colonialism in Africa, and to the thorny topic of restitution and repatriation of cultural heritage to the country of its origin." [40]
Jessica Kiang, writing in Variety in her review of Berlinale, said: "French-Senegalese director Mati Diop fashions her superb, short but potent hybrid doc Dahomey as a slim lever that cracks open the sealed crate of colonial history, sending a hundred of its associated erasures and injustices tumbling into the light." Kiang concluded: "Dahomey is a striking, stirring example of the poetry that can result when the dead and the dispossessed speak to and through the living." [16]
Stephanie Bunbury, in her review at Berlinale for Deadline said: "Open-ended, fecund with imagination and ideas, never hectoring or lecturing, not so much posing questions as asking what questions might be posed: Mati Diop's film is a marvelous provocation." [15]
Adam Solomons of IndieWire , reviewing at Berlinale, graded the film B and criticised the runtime of the film, he opined: "Dahomey might have worked better at a runtime of [closer to 30 minutes]: the student debate, though well staged, becomes a bit repetitive, and some of the shots of boxes being loaded and unloaded go at a snail's pace." Concluding Solomons praised the director Mati Diop and wrote: "Dahomey is a bold and memorable history lesson. But with Diop's expressive talents as they are, it's fair to hope that she returns to the world of fiction next time." [41]
Writing for RogerEbert.com , Robert Daniels praised "inventive" Diop's "distinct approach to the seemingly straightforward topic", highlighting the film's "dreamlike score", and saying that Dahomey "fills and nourishes the viewer with urgent desires, providing space for the light that constitutes the souls of Black folk to shine brighter through repair. Diop is back, and she is just as searing and imperative as ever." [42]
Reviewing in Le Polyester, Nicolas Bardot gave the film a 5/6 rating, and stated: "Mati Diop ambitiously mixes the political and the poetic. Her stories always project further than the facts apparent before our eyes." Concluding, Bardot opined: "In Dahomey, it is not only the present that the past finds, but also the future." [43]
Nicholas Bell in Ion Cinema rated the film with three and half stars and opened his review stating, "The spirit of Ozymandias, the classic poem from Percy Bysshe Shelley, might rouse itself in one's mind during Mati Diop's short but passionate documentary Dahomey – "Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"" Thus Bell opined, "[the film] is a depiction of a journey with so much more going on beneath the surface than an exchange of cultural artifacts." Concluding his review, Bell said: "Much like her 2019 narrative debut, Atlantics , Diop proves to be exceptionally adept at coalescing textures and strands in remarkably dense ways, and Dahomey is an excellent point of entry in an ongoing conversation." [44]
Peter Bradshaw reviewing for The Guardian rated the film with four stars out of five and wrote, "It is an invigorating and enlivening film, with obvious implications for the Elgin/Parthenon marbles in the British Museum." [45]
Shubhra Gupta, reviewing for The Indian Express , wrote that the film using a unique documentary approach laced with fantasy "powerfully challenges post-colonial notions of reparations and repair", and that the film is "A question that deserves our attention, and the answers that emerge from it..." [46]
