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A deconstruction of process. Observe as everything goes according to plan and watch as inevitability winds down like an alarm clock, enclosing success and failure in a vast, single environment, where death floats over as specter to the very consumerist fascination in which these youth embrace. Astounding cinema, with indelible musical cues, spatial magnificence, and a total horror display of an ending being only a few of its endless contradictory pleasures. A must-must-must see.

Sort like a French rework of Van Sant’s Elephant with the obsession with death and youthful waste replaced by an obsession with been fashionable. The political limits of current cinema love for surface abstraction laid bare. The empty out surface is the point, but it often feels little more than a cowardly retreat in face of a country psychosis.

“We did what we had to do,” argues one of the beautiful terrorist teens in Bertrand Bonello’s “Nocturama,” a vague and intriguingly inert thriller that waits 50 minutes before revealing “what they had to do” and never bothers explaining why they had to do it. It’s hypnotic all the same. Fresh off his emotionally extravagant biopic of fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, Bonello has returned with another film about the seductive power of surfaces. With his previous project, he presented that idea as his subject — with this one, he sublimates it directly into his style. The result is a portrait of radical violence that has almost no resemblance to terrorism as we know it, and yet sometimes feels all more accurate because of that.

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This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

Hop up out the bed turn my swag on
Pay no attention to them haters cause we whip 'em off
And we ain't doing nothing wrong
So don't tell me nothing, I'm just tryna have fun
So keep the party jumping

L'AUBE DES MORTS

Hollowed out and reduced to surfaces by a world that doesn't have space for them, children rebel in the language of the unheard and then use our atomized social structure for cover. There is no help.

Is there some kind of law in France that states that any art house film about disenfranchised young people must show them dancing listlessly?

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

If Willow Smith's "Whip My Hair" is the soundtrack to hipster millennial terrorists who really dig fashion and awesome sound systems, I think the future of the planet is in good hands.

Not one second is bearable #quit

Don't let haters get me off my grind
Keep my head up, I know I'll be fine
Keep fighting until I get there
When I'm down and I feel like giving up
I think again

Bertrand Bonello's Nocturama was finally released in the US several years after playing at Cannes, and is a fairly effective film looking at French adolescents attempt at committing domestic terrorism and the ramifications of their aftermath. There is clear distance that Bonello keeps the audience from throughout the entire run time. For the first half of the film, the kids are already in mid-process of enacting their plan as we the audience are trying to piece together what is going on. The back half is more rewarding as we see and feel their meandering in an upscale shopping complex. It's a grand statement of their youth, naivete, and the inexorable pull of capitalism.

"i just didn't know i was capable of doing something like that."

has the world gone crazy, or is it just us?

Watching this felt like being swallowed up in an isolation tank.