Phantasms and screens—enter the burrows of a teenager’s psyche in this bracingly original hybrid film by French auteur Bertrand Bonello.
An 18-year-old spends the pandemic lockdown trapped with her thoughts, FaceTiming friends, and consuming YouTube videos by an alluring life guru peddling bizarre devices as well as ideas on how to “live better”. Different realities and worlds, desires and projections, bleed into one another in a fever dream where meaning is but a thwarted attempt at existence.
Bookended by a letter to the filmmaker’s own teenage daughter, Coma was produced during the lockdown which spurred even greater creativity in terms of formal experimentation with the use of animation and found footage. Resisting interpretation, Coma is a daring work that reveals the impossibility of a totalising reality—especially in a teenage girl’s head.
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