Coma (2020)

A Russian science fiction action picture from 2020, directed by Nikita Argunov, in which a talented architect survives a crash and wakes inside a shared subconscious built from the memories of every coma patient currently attached to a machine. Cities, rivers, and icecaps share a single room. The laws of physics are suggestions. The premise is a sandbox, and the film treats it as one, which is the honest thing to do with a sandbox.

On the matter of social consciousness, the ledger is nearly blank, and that is an observation, not an indictment. The cast is drawn entirely from the domestic industry, with no representational gestures and no commentary on the absence of them. The character known as Fly can throw a punch and hold a line in a firefight, which earns her a faint nod, though the film advances no gendered argument about power, no thesis, no sermon. There is no LGBTQ content, no engagement with racial identity, no critique of wealth or class. The antagonists are not capitalists. They are the geometry of a dream that refuses to hold still.

The icecaps are set dressing, not a climate plea. The conflict is survival and metaphysics, and the film wants to show us a man learning to bend reality before it wants to show us a chase. It does not want to teach us anything. In an era when even the most modest genre exercise arrives with a moral stapled to its forehead, this is almost quaint. A film with nothing to say, said loudly, with decent production values and a straight face. The score reflects the emptiness, with a small mercy extended to Fly.