NOCTURAMA

Director: Bertrand Bonello

2016 / 130min / DCP

Bonello’s ingeniously structured terror attack thriller opens with a group of tense, shifty teens prowling the streets and subways of Paris, in the midst, as it happens, of pulling off an intricately planned bombing plot. After the explosions, however, the film becomes something altogether different, as these pretty, vacant subversives tuck away inside a luxe department store and lose themselves in consumer culture—clothes, televisions, toys, and a stirring soundtrack that includes Blondie, Chief Keef, Shirley Bassey, Willow Smith, and Bonello’s menacing electronic score—all the while oblivious to the authorities tightening a net around them. A damning “allegory of nihilism and decadence” (Film Comment), fairly steeped in late Millennial malaise.