Bertrand Bonello’s Nocturama follows a band of guerillas who, in their youthful determination, coordinate several attacks on Paris landmarks. After, they retreat into a department store where, following many hours of idling, a police raid leaves them all dead. Bonello does not subscribe to the beliefs held by these toy soldiers acting in a revolution of misdirected idealism. He never catalogs their ideology beyond describing their state and capitalistic targets in the establishment. With equal measures of precision detail and abstraction, the 2016 film enters a dreamscape that is skewed with youthful passion and dubious intent, yet thrust by the initial certainty of propulsive action. Still, the question of Bonello’s specific artistic ambition lingers. Does he intend to exploit modern anxieties about political extremism in service of a thriller or make a statement about a political perspective? Neither, as it turns out, to polarizing effect. Nocturama is far more nebulous in its meaning than anything so straightforward, weighing history, aestheticism, and contemporary events in an esoteric package. Bonello’s characters have as much psychological depth as the mannequins displayed in the department store where they take refuge. His young terrorists have adopted an image and political philosophy like wearing a mask, covering their internal struggle with an artificial certitude. With this, Bonello does not construct a bomb-of-a-film but sets an intriguing, if often frighteningly beautiful minefield for his audience to navigate.

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