COMA (2024) - Mark Reviews Movies

Coma, Film Movement

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 16, 2024

The main character of Coma is an unnamed young woman who has just turned 18, and just when her adulthood officially begins, a global pandemic halts her ability to experience and enjoy this new stage of her life. Writer/director Bertran Bonello's movie, dedicated (in lengthy foreword and postscript) to his daughter, imagines the extremes of this character's isolation, as well as her desperation to feel some connection to other people and a world that has practically stopped.

There's plenty of reason for fear in both of those feelings, and Bonello's movie, which is less a narrative and more a string of interconnected vignettes revolving around several ideas, attempts to get at that underlying anxiety. In many ways, it succeeds, especially when it comes to the young woman's one-sided relationship with an online celebrity who might be more sinister than her pleasant demeanor suggests. As a whole, though, this exercise in tone and mixed mediums doesn't quite become more than the sum of its parts.

The lonely 18-year-old, played by Louise Labèque, spends almost the entirety of this story in her bedroom, where her cellphone and laptop have become her only means of human interaction. She has video calls with some friends, but most of the woman's time is spent watching videos made by Paricia Coma (Julia Faure), a beautiful and cheery online personality.

Coma offers weather reports and promises dives into a variety of topics, but soon enough, she's selling products, such as a pattern-repetition game that cannot be lost, and hinting at darker ideas, such as oddly noting that a blender she's hawking cannot fit a human hand. This is the most compelling and considered thread of the intentionally meandering story, mainly because it understands the potential power of this kind of empty relationship. It's rather insidious how Coma convinces her audience that they're invulnerable, leading the main character to ponder and act upon thoughts of self-harm.

What seems relatively normal—under the circumstances, obviously—starts to become unsettling. The young woman imagines a soap opera playing out with dolls in her room, only for the melodrama to include an inappropriate laugh track, incest, and one character reciting a former President's social media posts verbatim. The dolls might actually have lives of their own, too, apart from an isolated teen's imagination.

A group chat with friends is briefly interrupted when one participant is convinced there's a person moving behind someone, leading to a legitimately frightening moment. Meanwhile, the protagonist's dreams become regular visits to a dark forest, filled with ominous screams and the mounting realization that the people in the woods might be ghosts.

For all of its dread-filled atmosphere, though, Coma never comes together as a sturdy narrative (There are, for example, a few undeveloped conceits, such as a Big Brother organization keeping tabs on the protagonist). That means the movie is entirely about its mood, which admittedly works in stretches but still comes across as an unfulfilled experiment.

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