By Tamiyana Roemer
Edited by Megan Belrose and Meera Pande
Breath carries both the weight of suffering and the lightness of relief at once, bringing life to the unexpected similarities between two drastically different contemporary films. The 2022 episodic film EO, directed by Jerzy Skolimowski, traces the encounters of a donkey who witnesses human cruelty and tenderness with equal bewilderment. Seen through the melancholic eyes of its eponymous animal protagonist, the film follows EO’s journey across Europe until his final stop at a slaughterhouse. Released in the same year, Saint Omer, directed by Alice Diop, is a story muddied by motherhood and fallibility. Rama, a novelist, attends the trial of Laurence Coly, a Senegalese immigrant charged with the murder of her fifteen-month-old daughter. Rama intends to use the trial as preparation for her upcoming retelling of the Medea myth, but she grows increasingly distressed as Laurence’s testimony dredges up painful memories of her own. Both narratives participate in a growing trend in contemporary cinema toward dissolving psychologically coherent or interpretable characters. Strikingly, however, both films extend a form of radical empathy to the characters—not through moral approval or narrative identification, but through a sensory attunement to embodied vulnerability. EO, blameless and largely incapable of intention, and Laurence, who repeatedly confesses her guilt, occupy opposite poles of moral legibility, yet both are granted an intense, destabilizing empathy. Across EO, where breath becomes a language of animal consciousness, and Saint Omer, where breathing forms a shared sensory field linking characters and spectators, empathy emerges less through understanding a mind than through feeling a body in space.
In both EO and Saint Omer, contemporary cinema demonstrates a paradoxical convergence: the disappearance of traditional, psychologically legible characters accompanies a heightened emphasis on radical empathy. Drawing on the physiological basis of empathy, this essay posits that these films foreground empathy as a bodily, non-moral phenomenon rooted in shared vulnerability rather than narrative comprehension. Between EO and Saint Omer, dialogue is limited in its ability to elicit empathy. EO cannot communicate through language. Laurence, owing to the conventions of a legal trial, speaks only when prompted, and her responses do little to explain her decision to murder her infant daughter. Both films, in their de-emphasis of the psychologizing potential of dialogue, place sonic weight on the sound of breath, thereby positing a vision of empathy and spectator-character connection that does not require the verbal explanations, psychological transparencies, or moral justifications of conventional character identification. This radical, physiological empathy suggests that contemporary cinema has effectively responded to the collapse of moral frameworks by turning to the body as an immediate and accessible site for human connection.
The modern difficulty of defining empathy is bound up with the term’s historically unstable meaning. Unlike sympathy—a concept used since antiquity—empathy is a comparatively recent human invention. Its genealogy begins in the late nineteenth-century German aesthetic tradition, where the term Einfühlung was developed by thinkers such as Rudolf Lotze and Wilhelm Wundt. In her discussion of empathy, Lanzoni explains that Einfühlung originally described a mode of “feeling into” an aesthetic object, a bodily and affective participation in form. But the translation of Einfühlung into English was a complicated process. By 1909, multiple different translations of Einfühlung emerged—most popular among them was “aesthetic sympathy” and often merely “sympathy” (Lanzoni 306). These differing translations reflected international debates regarding the role of association, imitation, motor movement, and the contribution of organic sensations in defining the term. James Ward and Edward B. Titchener landed on the anglophone term empathy around 1908 (308). Titchener’s adoption of the term empathy was intended to distinguish the process from that of sympathy. Drawing on the Greek empatheia, meaning “pathos” or “feeling,” empathy would be used as a psychological term. While “sympathy” had long been in circulation across philosophy, medicine, metaphysics, aesthetics, and everyday discourse, by the nineteenth century it was understood as a reliable means of accessing another’s thoughts and feelings. In contrast, Titchener defined “empathy” as an imaginative entry into one’s experience of objects (309).
The kinaesthetic capacity to read oneself into a situation, object, or stimulus based on an image of bodily movement formed the essence of Titchener’s understanding of “empathy.” Rather than sympathizing with the familiar, empathy was predicated on difference through a bodily imagining of oneself in a situation that was foreign or strange (319). Titchener argued that empathic response was constituted not by literal feeling but by kinaesthetic images—the mind’s inner representation of bodily movement, understood through analogy to the visual image and enacted in the “mind’s muscles” (304). In his laboratory at Cornell University, empathy referred not to understanding another person, nor even necessarily to aesthetic contemplation, but to the imaginative projection of bodily motion into objects of all kinds, from artworks to mundane laboratory stimuli. Empathy, for Titchener, was neither altruistic nor inherently interpersonal; it was an imaginative, sensorimotor mode of understanding grounded in the body. Subsequent research in the late twentieth century has provided empirical support for a physiological substrate to this kind of embodied empathy. Studies of shared autonomic responses have demonstrated that individuals’ cardiovascular and electrodermal patterns often synchronize when one accurately perceives another’s emotional state. Furthermore, accurate assessment of another’s negative emotions correlates with matched autonomic responses between individuals over time (Levenson and Ruef 245). These findings reinforce Titchener’s insight that empathy is not a cognitive or moral human act but a bodily phenomenon, grounded in the projection of sensorimotor and physiological patterns across individuals.
By foregrounding this kinaesthetic image, film becomes not merely an object of identification or emotional contagion, but a field that invites spectators to imaginatively project movements, tensions, or bodily dynamics into the screen space. One can therefore evaluate films through the lens of empathy as a kinaesthetic, image-driven mode of understanding—one that returns us to the earliest meaning of feeling into. The choices of the respective filmmakers to follow Laurence and EO—a woman who has committed infanticide and an animal who is not anthropomorphized—thus stage an extreme application of empathy as a mode that operates not through sympathy with the familiar but through the introduction of figures whose experiences are radically unfamiliar. Both films thus reconfigure audience expectations of narrative identification.
Skolimowski primarily bridges unfamiliarity through the universal measure of breath. The film opens with the rhythmic note of a brass instrument underscoring a circus act performed by EO alongside a woman named Magda. Lit by a strobing red light, Magda enacts a resuscitation. She performs dramatic rescue breaths near the mouth of the lying donkey until he rolls onto his feet and into a narrow spotlight. It is as if her breath links their livelihoods and animates the donkey into the world of the film. However, EO’s time with Magda at the circus is short-lived. Soon after his performance, while pulling a cart of junk, EO is surrounded by protestors who forcefully advocate for the release of circus animals. After their activism is established, the film muffles the sound of their voices, quieting them until EO’s own breathing emerges as the dominant sound amidst the human chaos. In this moment, the film emphasizes EO’s status as a living creature above all else. He is neither a moral agent nor a symbolic figure; he is a body that inhales and exhales, a creature whose presence is defined and validated by the rhythm of life itself. His breath is measured and calm, showing no signs of stress, resistance, or fear, signalling that the scene is less about the political or ethical stakes of the protest than the vitality and immediacy of EO’s existence.
EO’s breath most effectively elicits empathy when it is pained. In another episode of the film, he lies on the floor of an animal hospital, recovering from an attack by a group of incensed footballers. The camera offers close-ups of his snout, his nostrils inhaling and exhaling strenuously against the ground. Cut between an idyllic dream sequence in which Magda brushes her painted purple fingernails through his fur, the film suggests EO persists for her, but more importantly, it foregrounds both the sound and movement of breath: the proof of life which makes the continuation of his journey possible. Empathy arises not from understanding EO as a character, but from witnessing the processes of his living body in pain—his inhale, exhale, and minute bodily gestures form a tactile, kinaesthetic connection between audience and animal. In this way, the film stages a radical, non-interpretive form of empathy grounded in the intimate, corporeal experience of another being. Through the compounding power of sound and image, EO’s presence is rendered immediate, insisting on a form of relational attention that bridges the boundaries between species, allowing viewers to feel his vulnerability, endurance, and vitality as though it were their own.
Crucially, Skolimowski’s decision to make a film centred on a non-human protagonist who resists anthropomorphism is itself a major intervention. EO also cannot possess malice, guilt, or virtue in any human sense; he does not act according to moral frameworks, nor can he be judged by them. By denying the audience access to human-like interiority, the film forces spectators to experience empathy outside the habitual cognitive or ethical scaffolding. We do not evaluate EO’s choices or actions; we feel his breath, his struggle, and his vulnerability as corporeal phenomena. This radical non-anthropocentric perspective reorients empathy toward the sensorimotor and physiological realms. The film extends this corporeal empathy beyond EO to other animals, suggesting breath as a universal language of connection. When EO runs into a forest after escaping from a farm, he encounters wolves. Hunters shoot one, and the film emphasizes the sound of its whimpering, dying breaths, even before panning to reveal the mortally wounded body bleeding into a stream. The wolf’s image functions as a rhetorical tool, particularly as it is shot from EO’s approximated perspective, positioning the animal and the audience as intimately viewing interspecies pain. Yet by introducing the sounds of life and death before its visual representation, the film demonstrates a keen awareness of the auditory field’s power to elicit the audience’s concern. By foregrounding these breathing sounds, EO shows that empathy does not require understanding another’s narrative or intentions—it arises from attending to the shared, bodily proof of life itself. Breath becomes a medium through which humans and animals can connect affectively, highlighting an interspecies empathy that is non-interpretive and unmediated by language or consciousness.
Saint Omer begins and ends with the heavy sounds of survival through a mother’s laboured breaths. It is the weight of motherhood, with its quiet, haunting resonance, that anchors the film’s circular nature. The film explores the experience of Black motherhood while radically refusing the psychological legibility of Rama, Laurence, and their respective mothers due to limited dialogue. Laurence, in particular, is deliberately opaque. Even as testimonies and speeches unfurl the dysfunctions of Laurence’s personal history before the audience, the mother on trial is largely expressionless, allowing neither her face nor words to offer the jury a justification for her crime. Though Rama serves as the audience’s point of identification in the trial of an illegible character, she is present but withdrawn. The two women may refract each other’s histories, allowing the audience some insight into their lives, but the classical character psychology still dissolves largely into gestures, reactions, and corporeal micro-signals.
When a white professor belittles the possibility of Laurence’s interest in the philosopher Wittgenstein, Laurence stands silently, unable to protest the overt racism spoken so comfortably in front of the predominantly white audience of the courtroom. Language is not necessary, however, for the audience to feel Laurence’s distress. While her face remains placid, her chest rises and falls quickly in frustration, suggesting a suppressed interior experience even without its translation into dialogue. Laurence may manage her countenance and disposition with meticulous control, but these breaths, slipping past her managed visage, are a reminder of her humanity. Beyond the visual focus on breath, the film places sonic emphasis on its presence. In moments of Rama’s deepest discomfort at the trial, a cappella music plays, with quick, rhythmic breaths at the forefront of the beat, simulating her physiological distress and amplifying the audience’s sense of embodied tension and vulnerability (George). Together, the visual and auditory representations of breath foreground interior distress and insist upon the characters’ humanity amidst the courtroom’s formal attempts to define Black mothers.
The audience’s understanding of Laurence, however simple, emerges from Rama’s own reactions and memories in response to Laurence’s life. Laurence fills the dock of the courtroom as any other speaker would on a stage so serious. With only one accused and a sea of spectators, Laurence has little reason to return Rama’s gaze. Yet, the film reaches its climax when the sounds of courtroom formalities quiet into near silence, and the only audible sound is breath. It is in this pregnant moment, when the speeches that so determinedly seek to explain Laurence finally fade away, that Laurence looks directly at Rama, solidifying their solidarity at last. Breath becomes the connective tissue between the two women, a shared, corporeal presence. Because the spectator identifies with Rama, this embodied connection extends outward, drawing the audience into an intimate awareness of both women. The film refuses to morally exonerate or condemn Laurence. Instead, it stages her as unbearably human through breath. Radical empathy emerges here beyond the confines of understanding or judgment that so often shackle the traditional courtroom drama. Instead, it is simply a recognition of another’s suffering, made physically tangible as the spectator’s own breath aligns with the auditory field, creating a shared physiological resonance that links all three bodies in the cinematic moment.
Laurence’s trial ends with her lawyer’s closing statement, a painful explanation of motherhood meant to elicit the jury’s sympathy by asserting Laurence’s madness. Saint Omer reveals Laurence’s response to the speech much like EO reveals the body of the wolf. Laurence’s unrestrained, wounded cries are heard before her body is displayed. A slow pan across the courtroom leads to her, head hung behind the barrier of the dock, shuddering from the force of her sobs. Her lack of dialogue offers no justification or challenge to her lawyer’s framing of her crime as a result of madness. Yet by this point in the film, the audience no longer requires confirmation. Empathy for her suffering has already been cultivated. In this final moment, as Laurence’s defenses drop and her breath becomes most pained and audible, the film stages its ultimate elicitation of radical empathy, grounded beyond the confines of judgment and in the visceral, corporeal experience of her vulnerability.
Through flashbacks from Rama’s point of view, the film reveals that Rama’s mother is the source of both Rama’s fear of motherhood and her capacity for empathy toward Laurence, making her central to the film’s emotional edifice. Rama’s mother, with her loud, laboured breaths, extends the film’s bodily motif across characters and generations, embedding the weight of inherited trauma in sound. At the film’s conclusion, she is shown falling asleep in her living room as Rama watches silently. When the screen cuts to black, the sound of her breathing persists for a pronounced eighteen seconds, lingering as a testament to the imperfect endurance of maternal survival amidst migration and history. In these moments, Saint Omer stages radical empathy as a non-moral, corporeal phenomenon: the spectator does not need to understand any of the mothers fully to feel their presence and their hardship.
The characters in EO and Saint Omer are far from traditional. They are not psychologically coherent in the classical sense, nor are they fully legible through dialogue or action alone. This development of contemporary cinema may seem concerning considering that studies have shown that when an audience cannot identify with a narrative or its characters, disengagement may occur, prompting distraction or frustration and encouraging self-centred responses rather than openness to another’s life (Bal and Veltkamp). Yet in these two films, the absence of conventional characters does not preclude connection, but instead manages to both restructure and strengthen it. In EO, empathy emerges through shared breath across species, the donkey’s inhalations and exhalations inviting the audience into corporeal alignment. In Saint Omer, empathy is similarly mediated through breath, but across the morally ambiguous terrain of human action. The rapid rises and falls of Laurence’s chest, the amplified rhythms of Rama’s inhalations, and the tense vocal music create a field in which the spectator senses the weight of suffering without the need for narrative justification. Breath becomes the final common denominator, a bodily medium that transcends psychology, culture, language, and intention, producing a shared autonomic field in which the viewers and the characters subtly synchronize.
This corporeal attunement exemplifies a shift in contemporary cinema, where filmmakers turn increasingly to bodies rather than minds to cultivate empathy, which becomes affective, sensory, and relational, enacted without the crutch of moral comprehension. Perhaps this shift emerges in part from contemporary society’s wrestling with moral ambiguity and questions of whom we should feel for. As clear moral frameworks become less certain, cinema has turned to the body as a more immediate and accessible site for ethical engagement. In these films, character is dissolved while the rhythms of embodied experience are amplified. The filmmakers therefore preserve and intensify empathy, sustaining it within the ambiguous moral landscape of contemporary existence.
Works Cited
Bal, P. Matthijs, and Martijn Veltkamp. “How Does Fiction Reading Influence Empathy? An Experimental Investigation on the Role of Emotional Transportation.” PloS One, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 2013, pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3559433/.
EO. Directed by Jerzy Skolimowski, Skopia Film, Alien Films, 2022.
George, Joe. “Film Review: The Inexplicable Humanity of Saint Omer.” Progressive.Org, 24 January 2023, progressive.org/latest/film-review-inexplicable-humanity-saint-omer-george-24123/.
Lanzoni, Susan. “Empathy in translation: Movement and image in the psychological laboratory.” Science in Context, vol. 25, no. 3, 24 July 2012, pp. 301–327, https://doi.org/10.1017/s0269889712000154.
Levenson, Robert W., and Anna M. Ruef. “Empathy: A physiological substrate.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 63, no. 2, 1992, pp. 234–246, https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-3514.63.2.234.
Saint Omer. Directed by Alice Diop, Srab Films, 2022.
Feature Photo
Photograph courtesy of Srab Films / Arte France Cinema