Avis des critiques

If Coma is a superlative pandemic movie, it is because Bonello presents the “no time” of COVID as a discombobulating simultaneity of presents—the film’s different “layers” all implicated with each other. It creates the impression of the same event playing out in different, incompatible versions which nonetheless interpenetrate and reflect each other.

Don’t be misled by the more conventional pandemic scenes, like the teenager’s video chats with friends — “Coma” pushes the boundaries of the so-called lockdown movie with its thrilling, chaotic form... It may be anchored to that period, but it speaks to an existential crisis that defines many right now.

If Bertrand Bonello’s Coma is the first film to find something genuinely bracing to say about the Age of Covid, it’s probably because he mostly avoided exploring his own experience. Instead, Coma is a work of remarkable empathy... In a sense, [the film] is Bonello’s attempt to create concrete metaphors for both his daughter’s psychological states and his own inability to fully grasp them.

The ideas in Coma seem like sketches, meted out in the kinds of skits a teenager under lockdown might act out in the isolation of her bedroom... Viewers who see it before The Beast might appreciate its conceptual workshopping as a crucial precursor. But seen after that near-masterpiece, Coma can’t help but be a sleepwalking trifle.

Coma conjures up the spirit of 2020 like no other movie thus far. Through its unwieldy structure and genre delineation, Bonello’s film often feels every bit as disorienting as it was to scroll through social media timelines during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Coma does feel bigger than the bedroom in which it transpires. Bonello never just does anything... Of all the provocateurs of the French cinema (and boy they’ve got plenty), Bonello seems to really love his people, even though he can be cruel to them. Like the best post-punk artists, he sings the worst of our suffering so we might reflect on it and feel less alone.

Coma – a film made amid a terrible shock of the new, and intended to convey as much – already feels glaringly dated. Functioning as little but a very particular time capsule of its maker’s very particular, peak-pandemic frame of mind, Bonello’s sunless, doom-laden film serves to make most viewers glad they’re over that particular point, though beyond the general fog of ennui that permeates the whole endeavour, its insights into a present now past are few.

Less than horror, Coma cultivates gallows humor about the state of things—or rather, the stasis of things. The pandemic arrived just as the world appeared to be on the precipice of climate catastrophe, and Bonello finds the serendipity of this combination too neat to not be darkly amusing.

Coma is anything but a navel-gazing work, and more one of imaginative empathy... [It] 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.

That’s the thing about snapshots: They isolate and enshrine fleeting moments in time while the world keeps turning. And if, when printed and sent off for posterity, a snapshot like “Coma” offers a small degree of archival value — while answering the question Bonello poses at the start — it might also arrive as a postcard from a time all-too-thankfully gone by.

In an oversaturated market for pandemic-themed films, “Coma” is a delirious marvel of a reminder that, in the right hands, there is no such thing as an unfeasible subject.

More than just another lockdown movie on what a father fears for his daughter in this tormented COVID era, Coma is a flamboyant testimony to the right to dream, no matter what, in our current world. What initially started as just a small project during lockdown... turned out to be Bonello’s most personal and intimate film yet.