Coma review – vital signs are weak in Bertrand Bonello’s mopey lockdown drama

There are stabs of the same fear that made The Beast fascinating, but this tale of a bored teenager in a scary, affectless future is too unfocused

Prominent French film-makers are supported by their national industry and even their lockdown projects have been received with respectful attention. Earlier this year Olivier Assayas's autofiction Hors du Temps, or Suspended Time, premiered in Berlin - a dreamy Covid-era indulgence that he just about got away with. Now we have a chance to see Bertrand Bonello's musing sketch Coma: a lockdown essay that preceded his brilliant futurist film The Beast, with many of the same ideas and tropes.

Coma broods on a scary, affectless future in which humanity will evolve away from the primacy of love and selfhood, and in which sexuality and violence will then be prominent as a symptom of the need to feel something, anything. As so often, Bonello sees human beings as mere dolls or puppets; stuffed mammal-shapes whose supposed individuality is a preposterous fiction. Here, a teenage girl (Louise Labeque) mopes impassively in her bedroom, driven half-mad by lockdown boredom; the film's title hints at the inert hibernation we all went through.