The Cinematheque

Vancouver Premiere

“Coma borrows its title from noted technophobe Michael Crichton and its bad vibes from David Lynch, Kurosawa Kiyoshi, and Unfriended (2014), raw materials it duly dunks in a high-speed blender … Bonello simultaneously achieves the goals of a good horror filmmaker and a concerned parent.”

Adam Nayman, Cinema Scope

Out-of-sync time, scrambled space, and world-destroying harm—the final chapter in Bertrand Bonello’s trilogy of youth films (after Nocturama and Zombi Child) is an engrossing foray beyond contemporary reality, slicing through a thicket of dreams, vlogs, and dolls. Coma begins with the experience other pandemic-set movies fight to avoid: the eventless experience of time. In this specific case, one teenager (Louise Labèque) navigates the product pitches and life advice of Patricia Coma, a YouTube channel star with a touch of Lynchian intensity to her direct-to-camera addresses. ​“Beware of others’ dreams,” warns another video in the unnamed protagonist’s browser history; each layer in this mise en abyme suggests a malevolent dreamer and a boxed-in actor. Films about youth are always about freedom, and what Bonello thrillingly puts forward in Coma (a work dedicated to his daughter) traverses the whole gamut of teenage uncertainty and film language.

In French with English subtitles

“A maximalist work made under extreme constraint … There is something cathartic in Bonello’s refusal of comfort as he disjunctively renders the contours of a teenager’s inner life, sketching how her psyche is shaped by the strangeness and damage of a crushing present.”

Erika Balsom, Film Comment

“A superlative pandemic movie … In placing us so fully within the complexities of the COVID-era present, Coma reveals our very inability to unify it in thought.”

Lawrence Garcia, Reverse Shot