Coma movie storyline. Amidst a period of unprecedented world events, an eighteen-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.
Coma is a 2022 French film written and directed by Bertrand Bonello. Combining animation and live action, it tells the story of a teenage girl who is locked in her house during a global health crisis and navigates between dreams and reality, until she starts following a disturbing and mysterious YouTuber named Patricia Coma. It stars Louise Labèque, Julia Faure, Gaspard Ulliel, Laetitia Casta, Vincent Lacoste, Louis Garrel and Anaïs Demoustier.[5] Coma was the last film Ulliel worked in before his death.
Coma made its world premiere on 12 February 2022 at the 72nd Berlin International Film Festival, where it competed in the Encounters section and won the FIPRESCI Award for Best Film. It was released in theaters in France by New Story on November 16, 2022.
Film Review for Coma
Coma visualizes the imaginary world of a teenage girl. Motivated by the pandemic isolation, French writer/director Bertrand Bonello’s Coma explores the dreams and fears, hopes and anxieties of an unnamed eighteen-year-old. Through live action and animation, the journey chaotically glides through a myriad of current issues, skipping from one to another: the environment, social media influencers, cheating on and breaking up with romantic partners, and psychological entrapment.
Bonello opens and concludes Coma with a long, optimistic, philosophical message to his eighteen-year-old daughter Anna, the inspiration for the film and the person to whom it is dedicated. Merging reality and fantasy, subsequent events ponder and navigate issues, sometimes humorously, at other times seriously, always in a stream of consciousness. Abandoning logical progression, the interaction includes dreams anchored in unpredictable detours to Patricia Coma who skips from weather forecasts to advice.
In press notes, Bonello accurately describes his untethered, extravagant exploration as motivated by the pandemic lockdown plus his response to French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. He notes his combination of diverse textures with live-action, subjective camcorder shots, surveillance footage, archival footage, 2D and 3D animation, plus a nighttime forest with horror overtones. In other words, Coma is a rather chaotic assortment of ideas and images, reality and dreams. And yet, it captures our disjointed world and our free flowing stream of consciousness, including pervasive anxieties and elusive freedom from cultural conditioning.
Bonello pursues the slippage between imagination and invention, and it isn’t always easy to hang in there with him. As he says, he deliberately alternates from comedy to irony to more frightening moments. By the end, I appreciated the journey even though I wasn’t always sure where I had been at any moment. Coma is In French with English subtitles.
Coma (2024)
Directed by: Bertrand Bonello
Starring: Julia Faure, Gaspard Ulliel, Laetitia Casta, Vincent Lacoste, Louis Garrel, Anaïs Demoustier, Louise Labèque, Ninon François, Bonnie Banane, Mathilde Riu, Violette Guillon
Screenplay by: Bertrand Bonello
Cinematography by: Antoine Parouty
Film Editing by: Gabrielle Stemmer
Costume Design by: Pauline Jacquard
Art Direction by: Anna Bonello, Gaston Portejoie, Daphné Yvon
Music by: Bertrand Bonello
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: New Story
Release Date: February 12, 2022 (Berlin Film Festival), November 16, 2022 (France)
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