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.
The Beast director Bertrand Bonello’s preceding neo-Lynchian slow burn is getting new life follow his buzzy release in 2023. A surreal look at our contemporary covid reality, Coma is hailed as a “delirious marvel” (The Playlist) that defies the confines of genre, cinematic conventions, and narrative structure. Fearlessly tackling the uncertainties of the present, it dares to envision the bleak, lonely potentialities of tomorrow. Having been fully engulfed by the perspective of Jane Schoenbrunn’s meditation of online desperation, We Are All Going the World’s Fair, Coma feels like a comfortable cousin-film that I’m excited to experience.
Coma opens theatrically at New York’s Roxy Cinema on May 17th, 2024 with additional theaters to follow.
