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Bertrand Bonello’s latest horror film, engaged to his teenage daughter, crosses the boundaries of pandemic cinema.
By Beatriz Loayza
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“Coma,” a pandemic-themed horror film from director Bertrand Bonello, takes its name from one of its two cloistered characters living in France during the coronavirus lockdown. Patricia Coma (Julia Faure) is a social media influencer whose channel is made up of surreal stories. explainer videos, philosophical monologues, and weather reports (though it doesn’t matter, “you can’t pass out anyway,” he explains).
Patricia is an anonymous woman (Louise Labèque), sullen and introspective, who spends her days in seclusion glued to the screen.
Don’t be fooled by the more traditional scenes of the pandemic, such as the teenager’s video conferences with his friends: “Coma” crosses the barriers of the so-called lockdown film with its exciting and chaotic form.
At first, it seemingly tracks the teenager’s online interactions: Patricia’s uncanny missives and a smutty sitcom played out by stop-motion dolls. We also see the teenager’s recurring nightmare, in which she’s trapped in a purgatorial forest, as well as surveillance footage in which she appears to be out in the streets.
With Bonello’s smooth editing, the slow overflow between scenes and the intrusions of truth itself (President Trump’s tweets at the time play a major role) turn out to flatten time. In fact, it’s a cliché in films like “Locked Down” or Bo Burnham’s “Inside. “however, Bonello’s experimental technique brings a new point of desperation to this compressed edition of the truth.
As a short, minimalist production, “Coma” serves as an appetizer to Bonello’s recent epic “The Beast,” about the tragedy of characters without free will. Patricia is a kind of evangelist for this worldview. He sells a game reminiscent of electronics, like Simon, which the teenager plays to kill time, but, as if by some kind of black magic, he can’t seem to lose.
The film begins and ends with a subtitled message written by Bonello to his daughter, to whom he entrusted the film. He acknowledges the desperation unique to his generation: children accustomed to climate change and school shootings; Their most productive years were spent online, trapped at home by a global pandemic.
This message is also what makes “Coma” more than the paraphernalia of a lockdown movie: it possibly has its roots in this period, but speaks to an existential crisis that defines many at this time.
CommaUnclassified. Duration: 1 hour 22 minutes. In theaters.
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