bertrand bonello

Coma (2024)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

There was a lot of understandable pushback against the initial wave of “pandemic cinema” that was made during the first couple years of COVID-19, movies that distilled the mood & setting of our global lockdown into the same smartphone video diaries and Zoom meeting windows that we were already submerged in outside of The Movies anyway.  A lot of the resistance to that iconography from audiences & critics alike was just fatigue with the cheapness & smallness of that era in image production, but it was always couched in a concern that in the long term even the best pandemic movies were going to be instantly dated and, thus, disposable.  Betrand Bonello’s Coma defies that line of criticism by expanding the scope of lockdown-era doldrums as a symptom of a larger global illness, one that’s now persisted a half-decade beyond the initial COVID-19 outbreak.  It’s been nearly five years since the earliest COVID lockdowns and the world still feels like it hasn’t broken the spell we fell under then; we’re all still sleeping under the same weighted blanket of dread & futility.  That’s bad news for our collective mental health, but it’s great for the thematic shelf life of Coma, which finally went into wide release in 2024 after premiering at European film festivals two long, grueling years earlier.

Coma is a multimedia experiment in which Bonello attempts to relive the early lockdown days of the pandemic through his teenage daughter’s eyes.  A five-minute intro directly addresses the teen in subtitles without accompanying audio, urging her to not “surrender to the current mood,” because he believes things will eventually get better if we survive long enough to see it.  The drama that follows is mostly confined to a teen girl’s bedroom, with an actress playing a fictionalized version of his child (Louise Labèque, notably of Bonello’s Zombi Child).  She reaches out to peers through Zoom & FaceTime calls—at one point organizing a group-chat ranking of history’s greatest serial killers—but for the most part she’s tasked with entertaining herself in isolation.  She plays with Barbie dolls the way an 18-year-old would, imagining them in salacious soap opera sex scandals and feeding them outrageous dialogue from internet sources like Trump’s Twitter scroll.  She obsesses over the New Age musings of a social media influencer called Patricia Coma (Julia Faure, soon to appear in Bonello’s The Beast), who seems wise & poised until it becomes apparent that she’s suffering the same existential malaise as her followers.  The room alternates between rotoscope animation, Blair Witch found-footage nightmares set in a limbo-like “Free Zone” between worlds, paranoiac surveillance footage, and sponcon commercials for a pointless, existential memory game called The Revelator.  The entire movie is just the daily toiling of a teenager who passes her time “doing nothing much,” and the oppressive listlessness of it all is suffocating.

Bonello is mostly being playful here, and most of the appeal of the movie is in watching an accomplished filmmaker daydream in internet language, mentally drifting from the boredom of modern life.  Still, there is a heartfelt urgency in his appeal to his daughter to remain resilient despite the great Enshitification of everything, to the point where the movie is less about her interior response to the lockdown than it is about his own anxieties about having created a young child in such grim, impotent times.  In pandemic cinema terms, the result lands somewhere between the vulnerable earnestness of Bo Burnham’s Inside and the digital-age terror of the screenlife horror Host.  It’s the same push-and-pull tension between dread and romantic idealism in Bonello’s follow-up, The Beast, except that this time he’s actively fighting to not let the dread win.  Coma finds Bonello desperately searching for hope in an increasingly isolating dead-end world, because he has to believe his child is not going to suffer through The End.  The real horror of it all, of course, is that no one ever imagined the apocalypse would be this much of a bore.  As a species, we’ve never been lonelier or more useless than we are right now, and the first year of COVID lockdowns was only the start of that cultural decomposition.  I wish this movie had aged poorly in the past couple years, but unfortunately it’s still painfully relevant.

-Brandon Ledet

The Beast (2024)

/ swampflix / 8 Comments

There’s something warmly familiar about the premise of two destined-to-be-together characters cyclically falling in love across past & future lives through reincarnation, but I can’t immediately name many concrete examples.  There’s a somber melodrama version of it in The Fountain, a cartoony alternate-universe version in Everything Everywhere All At Once, and a bodice-ripping romance version in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but I’m certain there’s a much longer list of titles I’m forgetting.  However, I’m also certain that I’ve never seen that dramatic template distorted in the way Bertrand Bonello distorts it in The Beast, the same way he distorts the terrorism thriller template in Nocturama and the zombie outbreak template in Zombi Child.  The Beast is a sci-fi fantasy horror about a woman who falls for the same entitled fuckboy over & over again in each of her past & future lives, and all that changes across them is the temporal context in which he sucks.  During the Great Paris Flood of 1910, she is seduced out of a loving marriage by the horny, handsome pest.  In the 2010s, he stalks her as a creepy incel with a low-follower-count YouTube Channel, planning to make an example out of her as revenge on all the women who’ve sexually rejected him despite being a Nice Guy.  In the 2040s, the specifics of how he sucks are mysterious until the final moments, as the doomed couple are estranged by an isolating, unemotional society dominated by A.I.  She does fall for it again, though, and the cycle continues.  Usually, when you say a couple was “meant for each other,” you don’t mean it in a Roadrunner & Wile E. Coyote kind of way, but there’s something darkly, humorously true to life about that romantic dynamic that makes for a refreshingly novel use of a familiar story template.

Léa Seydoux stars as the Wile E. Coyote of the relationship, helpless to find her puppy-eyes suitor attractive in every timeline even though he consistently destroys each of her lives.  George MacKay is her Roadrunner tempter: an arrogant nerd who pursues her across centuries even though he’s cursed to “only have sex in his dreams.”  Their centuries-spanning relationships qualify both as science fiction and as fantasy.  The 2040s timeline is used as a framing device in which our future A.I. overlords offer to “cleanse our DNA” of residual trauma to make us more efficient, emotionless workers; it’s through this cleansing procedure that Seydoux relives her past flings with MacKay and learns no lessons through the process.  The crossover between timelines is also confirmed by multiple psychics, though, both of whom warn Seydoux to steer clear of the fuckboy loser to no avail.  They also explain that their mystic practices are only considered supernatural because science has not yet caught up with the real-world logic behind their effectiveness – a gap that has presumably been closed by the A.I. machines of the 2040s.  In every version of her life, Seydoux is plagued by an overbearing sense of dread that something catastrophically awful is going to happen (in an allusion to the Henry James novel The Beast in the Jungle), and she is always right.  After all, in order to live multiple lives you have to die multiple deaths.  Whether that premonition is related to the natural disasters that coincide with MacKay re-entering her lives or simply to MacKay himself is up for interpretation, but either way he’s physically attractive enough that she never learns the lesson that his physical presence is bad news.  It’s like a cosmic joke about how someone always falls for the same loser guys despite knowing better, taken literally.

The Beast is one of those purposefully cold, inscrutable Euro provocations that you’re not sure is intended to be taken entirely seriously until the second act, when Bonello tips his hand by making you watch clips from Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers in a brilliant throwaway gag.  Its closest reference points are crowd-displeaser genre exercises from esteemed film festival alumni: Assayas’s Demonlover, Petzold’s Undine, Wong’s 2046, Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, etc.  It builds its own micro mythology through visual motifs of pigeons, babydolls, and seances that can feel meaningful & sinister in the moment but read like generative A.I. Mad Libs screenwriting when considered as a whole.  Bonello is clearly genuine in the ambition of his scale, crafting a story that requires him to convincingly pull off costume drama, home invasion, and sci-fi genre markers all in the same picture, depending on the timeline.  He’s also constantly poking fun at his own project, though, something that’s indicated as soon as the film opens in a chroma-key green screen environment as if he were directing a superhero film in the MCU.  Sometimes the dolls are creepy; sometimes they’re M3GAN-style jokes about uncanny robotics.  The pigeons foretell the immediate arrival of Death, but it’s also hard not to laugh when one attacking Seydoux is scored as if it were a flying hellbeast.  Like all of Bonello’s previous provocations, The Beast was designed to split opinions, but I thought it was a hoot.  It can be funny, scary, sexy, or alienating depending on the filmmaker’s momentary moods; the only constant is the male entitlement of the central fuckboy villain, which is only effective because he’s such a handsome devil.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #117 of The Swampflix Podcast: Zombi Child (2020) vs. The Zombie Diaspora

/ swampflix / 8 Comments

Welcome to Episode #117 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, and Britnee discuss Bertrand Bonello’s new film Zombi Child (2020) and the ever-broadening zombie genre’s diasporic exodus away from its Haitian Vodou roots. Enjoy!

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, YouTube, TuneIn, or by following the links below.

– Britnee Lombas, James Cohn, and Brandon Ledet

Zombi Child (2020)

/ swampflix / 10 Comments

Bertrand Bonello’s follow-up to the wonderfully icy teen-terrorist drama Nocturama is a from-the-ground-up renovation of the zombie film. Zombi Child directly reckons with the racist, colonialist history of onscreen zombie lore, and pushes through that decades-old barrier to draw from the untapped potential of its roots in legitimate Vodou religious practices. It’s a deceptively well-balanced film that evokes both Michael Haneke’s cold, academic political provocations and Celine Sciamma’s emotionally rich coming-of-age narratives while somehow also delivering the genre goods teased in its title. The only film I can recall that attempts its same wryly funny but passionately political subversion of long-established horror tropes is the recent festival circuit curio I Am Not a Witch, and yet it’s clearly part of the same lineage as its genre’s pre-Romero beginnings in titles like I Walked With a Zombie. Gore hounds and horror essentialists are likely to be bored by the thoughtful, delicate deconstruction of the genre attempted here, but if you can get on-board with Bonello’s academic evisceration of zombie cinema tropes the movie feels almost outright revolutionary.

The narrative is split between two dominant timelines. In 1960s Haiti, a man is zombified by a Vodou ritual that drags his body out of the grave only to force him to work as a slave on a sugar cane plantation. In 2010s Paris, his teenage descendant is struggling to adapt to her new life at a bougie boarding school for (mostly white) French legacy kids, gradually losing touch with her Haitian heritage. The modernism of the contemporary timeline at first feels entirely disconnected from the eerie atmosphere of the historical Haitian setting. Teen girl bonding rituals and casual discussions of Rihanna’s discography don’t immediately feel as if they have anything to do with zombie plantation slaves an ocean & a half-century away. Gradually, though, it becomes clear that the subjugative evils of the past cannot be severed from their echo in the present; it is impossible to have a normal, healthy relationship across class, cultural, and racial borders without acknowledging the colonialist abuses of our ancestors. At least half of Zombi Child is an observational coming-of-age drama that plainly presents modern teen girlhood at its most natural, but it still manages to establish a direct tether from that setting to a centuries-old Vodou tradition long before the connection becomes explicit at the film’s crescendo.

The most impressive aspect of Bonello’s touch here is how out in the open the film’s academic explorations can be, even though a significant portion of the screentime is focused on teens just hanging out, being kids. Classroom lectures at the boarding school about the unfulfilled promises of the French Revolution and the imperialist legacy of Napoleon Bonaparte (the school’s founder, no less) are allowed to simmer for minutes on end. The girls themselves are self-designated literature nerds, which means they get to discuss the evolution of the zombie movie in-dialogue and to recite poems with lines like “Listen, white world, as our dead roar. Listen to my zombie voice honoring the dead.” The historical Haiti setting is much less vocal, as it mostly follows a zombified plantation slave’s sublingual path back to human consciousness. It’s no less overtly academic in its themes, though, pushing discussions of how cinema represents “black bodies” and slave labor to its most literal extreme. Sequences of zombie field workers despondently hacking at sugar cane with machetes—too pathetically drained of human life to even remain vertical without assistance—are just as horrifying as any brain-eating or disemboweling undead carnage you’re likely to see in a more straightforward genre exercise.

The zombie genre has become an over-saturated market in the last few decades, especially when it comes to grim post-Apocalyptic melodramas like The Walking Dead. At this point, the term “zombie apocalypse” alone is enough to send even the most horror-hungry audiences running to the hills out of madness & boredom. The continued appeal of zombies as a genre device is understandable though, especially when you consider the flexibility of the metaphor. There’s nothing especially novel or compelling about the survivalist, doomsday prepper bent of most modern zombie media, but there are still plenty of outlier examples where storytellers uncover new thematic purposes for the undead in metaphor: Indigenous peoples’ frayed relationships with white settlers in Blood Quantum, the monstrous stench beneath America’s idealized Conservative past in Fido, the unwelcome return of Nazi ideology in Overlord & Dead Snow, etc. Zombi Child feels like a slightly different beast, though, and not only because it’s not a straight-up Horror film. Bonello’s contribution to the genre stands out because he dials the clock back even further than these equally political Romero riffs to directly engage with zombie lore at its original, real-world birthplace. It scorches the earth so it can start entirely anew, calling into question whether our cultural zombie obsession is itself a continuation of colonialist pilfering. More impressive yet, it does so while also taking time to declare “Diamonds” to be the best Rihanna song.

-Brandon Ledet