Coma
World of concrete memories
In the last years, the film industry has produced many sci-fi movies, but most of the time it seems to have fallen into a pattern of sameness. So it has been a pleasant surprise to find Russian movies of the genre very creative and even surprising. This is the case of “Coma” (“Koma”, RUS, 2019).
A young man (Rinal Mukhametov) wakes up in his apartment without knowing what happened to him or even his name. Stranger still is the fact that everything seems incomplete, full of holes, even the photos in the frames.
When he goes out into the street, the surprise is even greater. In addition to buildings and streets being incomplete, with parts missing, the landscape around it is as absurd as possible. Parts of famous landmarks, such as the Golden Gate of San Francisco, or the Eiffel Tower of Paris appear in the sky in incongruous and illogical positions.
Suddenly he is approached by a group of young people who say they have come to rescue him. At the same time, a misshapen and menacing creature chases them, while they jump from one neighborhood to another, in situations that defy any concept of gravity or normality.
Upon arriving on your secure ground, the young man knows his rescuers. Fly (Lyubov Aksyonova), Phantom (Anton Pampushnyy) and Astronom (Milos Bikovic) introduce him to leader Yan (Konstantin Lavronenko). He then discovers that that strange world they are in is where the minds of people who are in a deep coma roam and all he sees are memories of them.
The hideous creature that chased them was a Reaper, someone who died in a coma and is still maintained by machines. The Reapers appear to be the Russian version of the Harry Potter Dementors, and like them, they feed on the minds of those who are alive.
Forced to find his place in the group, the young man discovers that he has the power to build structures, which is why he receives the nickname Architect. While trying to contribute to the group, the Architect seeks to understand the laws that order that universe while looking for a way out to return to his normal life.
The Architect feels a powerful affinity with Fly and suspects that the two know each other outside Coma, without having any memory of it. When the group seeks a new place, safe from the reapers, they fall into a trap, and everyone is at the mercy of these grotesque beings.
At this point, the Architect returns to reality, and finds that it is much more cruel and strange than the world of Coma. He discovers that thanks to a perfidious mind, people are induced into a coma with a shady goal, by someone who wants to create a universe for himself.
“Coma” proves that even in such an explored genre it is still possible to bring original and creative ideas. In addition to a good story, the film features a set of graphic effects of exceptional quality, equivalent to any Hollywood production. One reason is perhaps the fact that director Nikita Argunov, in his directorial debut, comes from this area.
The cast also has great performances, notably the young actor Rinal Mukhametov, who also starred the films “Attraction” (“Prityazhenie”,RUS,2017) and “Invasion” (“Vtorzhenie”,RUS,2020), already reviewed in this column.
An additional aspect, which we could clarify, is about the difference between the image that we have of someone, and that made internally of himself. As the film shows, when we see a war maimed, an autistic person and a drug addict, we do not imagine that inside that person he or she believes to be someone special, often imprisoned in a state of social coma.