Vague Visages’ Coma review contains minor spoilers. Bertrand Bonello’s 2022 movie features Julia Faure, Louise Labèque and Ninon François. Check out the VV home page for more film reviews, along with cast/character summaries, streaming guides and complete soundtrack song listings.

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Less than a month into the COVID-19 lockdown, Hollywood swiftly greenlit several projects about life in the pandemic. Several of such films, such as the Anne Hathaway movie Locked Down (2021), were shamelessly rushed into production and released the second restrictions could allow. Amidst this wave, French filmmaker Bertrand Bonello hurriedly made Coma, a 2022 Berlinale premiere which invokes the anxieties and isolation of lockdown in a fragmented, hallucinatory manner. Shot on a low budget and largely within the director’s own home, the 82-minute film stars Louise Labèque as an unnamed teenager whose obsession with YouTuber Patricia Coma (Julia Faure) affects her already loosened grip on reality.

Bonello’s unusual hybrid of essay aesthetics and existential surrealism feels all the richer when considering the recent U.S. premiere of his 2023 film,The Beast. In the early stretches of Coma, the director depicts lockdown boredom at its most grounded, showing his teenage protagonist falling down endless YouTube rabbit holes and landing on a series of videos by Patricia Coma in which she promotes a device called The Revelator. The Vlogger’s videos all have an uneasy undercurrent, utilizing the format to offer offbeat critiques of society, but none more so than her marketing of a device which she proclaims will remove any illusion of free will from the user. The product has four buttons, which light up in elaborate patterns that the user must copy, to the point that mimicking them becomes second nature — which appears, at first, to be nothing more than an allegorical illustration of the powerlessness and hopelessness of lockdown.

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Coma recontexualizes a recurrent theme in science fiction, recalling Ted Chaing’s 2005 short story What’s Expected Of Us, in the way it hints that a societal unravelling could be provoked by any device which appears to have the ability to second-guess human nature. This pessimistic view of free will is shared by The Beast, which had already been written prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. As for Coma, the film exposes an artist who was looking to explore their growing preoccupations at a time when they were unable to make their next project, due to forces beyond their control. If it provokes a feeling of anxious helplessness within the viewer, then it’s not just a reflection of an uncertain moment in our shared history, but also of Bonello’s own fears as an artist during a period where the very prospect of making a movie was stalled by similar forces. The auteur theory may suggest that the artist is the driving force behind any movie; however, Bonello appears quick to suggest that there are higher powers which predetermine the very nature of creation.

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Nocturama, Bonello’s 2016 film about disenfranchised Parisian young adults who co-ordinate terrorist attacks with no clear motive, functions as a companion piece of sorts to Coma, if not an equally nihilistic mirror image. Both movies are studies of young characters who want to be free of the oppressive inevitabilities of modern life, pitched at the most drastic opposing ends of the spectrum, with unnamed protagonists retreating further into a self-imposed limbo.

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As with the antiheroes of Nocturama, or the incel killer played by George MacKay in the 2014-set portions of The Beast, the darkness within Coma’s young protagonists’ is brought to the surface with a disarming casualness. Two years after the original premiere, Bonello’s film exists as a despairing time capsule. It manages to directly conjure up the anxieties of communicating with the wider world entirely through a screen, with the delineation between reality and hallucinatory nightmares functioning as the strongest and most evocative depiction of lockdown culture thus far.

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Whereas the aforementioned Locked Down tries to ground itself as a time capsule in the broadest sense, context from the wider world is used sparingly in Coma. One of the animated stop-motion interludes — one aspect of the film which doesn’t particularly work — features several presidential gags about Donald Trump. Elsewhere, a Zoom conversation abruptly ends in a manner seemingly designed to recall the wave of independently produced Zoom-themed horror films — namely Rob Savage’s cult sensation Host (2020), which became a mainstream news story at a time when good news was notably lacking.

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Ultimately, Coma conjures up the spirit of 2020 like no other movie thus far. Through its unwieldy structure and genre delineation, Bonello’s film often feels every bit as disorienting as it was to scroll through social media timelines during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Alistair Ryder (@YesitsAlistair) is a film and TV critic based in Manchester, England. By day, he interviews the great and the good of the film world for Zavvi, and by night, he criticizes their work as a regular reviewer at outlets including The Film Stage and Looper.

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