Trailer
A desire to provoke and polarise lies at the core of Bertrand Bonello’s Nocturama. It’s a technically dazzling, unnervingly timely account of young terrorists wreaking havoc in central Paris – Bonello completed his initial cut shortly before the November 2015 attacks. The first act is a near-wordless masterclass in slow-burn suspense, in which a diverse group of photogenic teens play their parts in a mysterious operation. Afterwards, they convene in a cavernous luxury department store to hide out until the chaos they’ve caused has abated. But rather than shed any light on their motives and backgrounds, Bonello wryly depicts the kids being seduced by the consumerist opulence of their self-imposed prison. Imagine Godard adapting Bret Easton Ellis’ Glamorama, and you’ll have some idea of what to expect – a film that will strike some as a profound study of moral ambivalence, others as merely aggravatingly ambiguous.
Nocturama | Directed by Bertrand Bonello (France, Belgium, Germany 2016) with Finnegan Oldfield, Vincent Rottiers. Starts May 25
Check our OV search engine for showtimes.