Coma (2022, Bertrand Bonello) (Patreon)

51/100

Sorta the arty French equivalent of Bo Burnham: Inside, though it's not exactly funny (apart from some of Ms. Coma's YouTube videos) and seeks to convey a loved one's distress in lockdown isolation rather than the filmmaker's own slow mental breakdown. Bonello employs multiple oddball no-budget methods with wildly varying effectiveness; I never really got a handle on the Superstar-style Barbie-doll soap opera (with its interpolations of dialogue taken from Trump's deranged tweets—warning, this is that kind of movie), while occasional shifts to animation suggest "unreality" in a way that struck me as pretty generic. I'm also still not sold on Louise Labeque*, whose odd opacity has her once again playing a zombi child. (He could've just recycled that title here, honestly.) Julia Faure, by contrast, evokes a performative uncanniness that lends a real frisson to Patricia Coma's insistence that free will is illusory. "Scenes"—they're more like interludes—involving a food processor with an opening that may or may not accommodate a human hand genuinely freaked me out a bit, and the Simon Says game that can't be lost, even when played with eyes shut, comes at frustration and despair from an intriguingly odd angle. Every time I started getting interested, though, Bonello would cut back to the dolls, or throw in a random musical number, or introduce a more conventional horror-film aspect (stranger lurking in the background of a friend's Zoom square) that's too familiar to function as metaphor, or have Patricia Coma announce that France has been eliminated from a global COVID-19 vaccine lottery. And while it's touching to watch a director struggle to get inside his child's head, wondering aloud how she can cope with her world suddenly retracting at age 18, it never seemed to me as if he comes within kilometers of succeeding. Though I can appreciate that the flailing itself might be deeply moving to viewers who, unlike me, have distraught kids of their own. 

* Michael Nordine, in his Variety review, parenthetically calls Labeque (whom he calls Babeque; get a fucking proofreader, Variety) "the filmmaker’s daughter." I can't confirm that anywhere and assume it's an incorrect assumption based on her unnamed character representing Anna, the daughter to whom Bonello speaks directly in opening and closing text narration. (I'm likewise assuming that Anna's a real person and not a conceit; as this film twice notes, and I just now confirmed, Nocturama was dedicated to her.) It would explain why she's suddenly his muse, though.