Few––I mean one or two––films from last year were equal to Bertrand Bonello’s Coma. It also never got a theatrical release. Though I’d try offering some explanation, all possible reasons are imperceptible to me or almost anyone who’s seen it. At a time when much fails to excite, Coma is an appreciated reminder that contemporary cinema can still be so renegade, pensive, mournful, personal to such astonishing ends, and so exceedingly elastic.
We’re thus thrilled to present the Toronto premiere of Coma, in conjunction with contributor Ethan Vestby’s screening outfit Bleeding Edge, at the Innis Town Hall on Thursday, May 4, featuring an introduction by yours truly. Tickets are available now for $15, with a $1.50 discount available to Film Stage readers who use the code TFSComa. When else is there a chance to see the film in theaters? I’d love to have a definitive answer, but 14 months since its premiere Coma has remained without a home.
As David Katz said in our review, “Coma flies by in 80 brisk minutes. Bonello had enough material here, enough ideas, to have gone longer, but that would dispel its peculiar rhythm, ending as it does with the sensation of being shaken out of a dream-laden sleep. I immediately wanted to watch it again, ‘immediately’ being a figure of speech––a few weeks hence should be enough time to marinate on its ideas. How valuable it is to have this pandemic-era dispatch from Bonello, one of the only directors since Lynch to grasp that in dreams begin responsibility.”
Watch the trailer below:
Bleeding Edge is a Toronto-based programming collective dedicated to the promotion of new and vital cinema on the “bleeding edge” of the medium.