(Bertrand Bonello, 2022, France, 81 minutes)
Surely one of the most singular films to emerge from the lockdown months of 2020, French auteur Bertrand Bonello’s Coma follows a quarantining 18-year-old who becomes obsessed with a vlogger named Patricia Coma. Without giving up any of his authorial markings despite the very restricted means he made the film under, Bonello (The Beast, Nocturama) makes a live action/animation hybrid that digests this too-fresh-in-our-heads memory and uses it as fertilizer to create a dreamscape that doesn’t sugarcoat anything while somehow making it seem fresh and interesting.
In French with English subtitles