Coma review – Bertrand Bonello’s lockdown dreamscape is one for the devotees

The phenomenon of COVID isolation cinema has rapidly evolved into its own set of cliches. Bertrand Bonello, by most markers one of Europe's major filmmakers, boldly opens Coma, his latest, with footage from his 2016 film Nocturama. Clips from that teen-terrorist film play, blurred and near unrecognisable, as subtitles deliver a letter from the hand of Bonello to his daughter. He is sorry she will grow up in a bad world, sorry that his magnum opus, Nocturama, is so bleak and unforgiving towards the younger generation. Pounding electro builds throughout, a strange choice to score one’s heartfelt confessions, but a choice that nonetheless captures the wild swings that the film will take.

Then comes the film proper. A teenager (Louise Labeque), blossoming, life very much before her, is rendered into a Rapunzel figure by the blight of the pandemic. Through amusing if familiar scenes set on FaceTime, she interacts with her friends, still gossiping, still laughing, but distant. Her vision of the world outside comes only from the digital, and soon she falls under the spell of incantatory YouTuber Patricia Coma (Julia Faure). Like much of the pandemic, her life seems to slip into a dream.

This oneiric quality becomes the other driving force of the film. The teenager sleepwalks to a purple-hued “free zone” of a forest, which she pulls the women from her psyche into. But it feels disjointed, and Bonello never seems interested in exploring this metaphor from multiple angles. It’s a hard surface, one of many that the director busies himself with over the course of the short, 80-minute runtime.

One recurrent, misguided section of the film is set in a doll’s house in the teenager's room, where she imagines a soap opera occurring between her various, teen-idol-styled dolls. It’s akin to Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, and the form of these scenes ranges between static mannequin and stop-motion animation. As sexually deviant elements take over this plot, we dig out some of Bonello’s most fearful urges.

Elsewhere he makes the baffling choice to include a character mimicking Trump tweets word for word. While it’s funny to hear the late Gaspard Ulliel recount some of the Cheeto’s best moments in the French language, its very inclusion belies Coma’s inability to really consider the present moment. Trump was defeated in 2020, and has been followed by the danger of apathy that Joe Biden promises. Isn’t that a scarier thought for a teenager?

Bonello’s effort to connect with his daughter through cinematic technique rings false. For one thing, this film about isolation, technology, climate, and now doesn’t care to depict people wearing masks. And while it's sure that this film was made long before Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging or Looney Porn, Coma can’t help but feel like second best. For all of the experimentation, abrasion, and coarseness that Bonello enjoys interrupting his plot-driven works with, its full leaning into disjunction marks a film that will be hard to love for all but his most hardcore devotees.

Coma was screened as part of the Berlinane Film Festival 2022. A UK release date is yet to be announced.