No secret that we love The Beast. But it’s perhaps not even the best Bertrand Bonello film released in 2024. For more than two years I’ve been a major advocate of his lockdown horror Coma (at one point flying to another country to screen it), during which time the film’s struggled to achieve American distribution––a baffling, embarrassing oversight corrected by Film Movement, who are releasing this masterpiece-of-sorts at New York’s Roxy Cinema (where you can see House of Tolerance this weekend) on May 17, with other cities to follow. There’s now a trailer.
As David Katz said in his review from 2022’s Berlinale, “Coma is anything but a navel-gazing work, and more one of imaginative empathy. It is not Being Bertrand Bonello, but addressed to and concerning a person of a far-removed generation and gender: his teenage daughter Anna. Some amusing early interactions with pop culture, especially music, come from this cross-generational conversation: ‘turn that garbage off’ et al. But Bonello looks at the Zoomer state of mind, as he does for much else of importance, and has cutting, perceptive and troubling things to say.”
Find preview and poster below, and listen to the film’s soundtrack here:
Amidst a period of unprecedented world events, an 18-year-old girl’s life is placed on hold. Isolated in her bedroom, she falls under the spell of the mysterious vlogger Patricia Coma. As time carries on, the lines between her dreams, fears, hopes, and reality begin to blur into one another. From French master Bertrand Bonello (“The Beast,” “Zombi Child,” “Nocturama”), “Coma” is “a neo-Lynchian slow burn masterpiece” (International Cinephile Society) that creates a dream-like representation of our present. A “delirious marvel” (The Playlist) that breaks apart boundaries of genre, filmmaking, and storytelling, “Coma” bravely confronts the anxieties of today in order to imagine the possibilities of the future.
