Coma (2024)

Direction: Bertrand Bonello
Country: France

From the director of Nocturama (2016) and The Beast (2024), Bertrand Bonello, Coma is a challenging avant-garde drama with eerie tones and experimental flair. Matured and shot during the Covid lockdown, the film resulted as an expansion of a short film, aguishly exposing a world that is manifestly out of balance.

Louise Labèque, who previously collaborated with Bonello in Zombi Child (2019), portrays a teenager whose mind wanders while confined indoors. Her interest is piqued by Patricia Coma (Julia Faure), a YouTube influencer who advertises and sells a cubical object called The Revelator, leading her to experience hypnotic, if anxious, dream states. 

Coma isn't a film you can digest right away; it's a movie to enjoy or detest, at your leisure. While some may find it occasionally transfixing, others might struggle with its prolonged nightmarish limbo, which the film accurately portrays. It offers a radical reflection on isolation and the current state of the world, presented as an overstuffed pastiche with references to demons, possessions, psychopaths, serial killers, self-control, freewill, obscure dreams, and poignant realities.

While its major problem lies in the excess of disparate elements, scattered techniques, and tangled ideas, which oscillate between banality and provocation, Coma remains an open work of art with something to say about a very specific and significant time for humanity.

Lola (2023)

Direction: Andrew Legge
Country: Ireland, UK

Nobody can deny that Lola, an avant-garde sci-fi drama in the style of a docu-fiction, is inventive and bold. This experimental Guy Maddin-esque effort by first-time director Andrew Legge is invested in an enigmatic world of found footage, the ability to see the future, controversial decisions in wartime, and a bit of self-discovery. It plays like a feverish funhouse with eclectic music - from art-rock to electronic to the classical music of Elgar - and retro visuals that authenticate the power of film as a medium. 

Shot with several cameras and period lenses, and dreamt in black and white, Lola is the story of two orphaned sisters, Thomasina (Emma Appleton) and Martha (Stefanie Martini), who created LOLA, an advanced machine that can see into the future and intercept its messages. The year is 1949, but the sisters are already enthusiastic fans of David Bowie and Bob Dylan (the music of the future). Almost without notice, they became the secret weapon of the British military intelligence in the war against Germany, but not without a few predicaments that could change the course of history as we know it. 

Story-wise, there’s not much to be happy about it, but even self-indulgent at times, the film has a strange appeal, developing with imagination at an irregular rhythm. These emphatic montages can be very artistic but also gimmicky in its dramatic time travel hallucination. Lola is an unusual picture, insanely evocative and hard to predict.