Best Movies about Waking up from a coma

Filmy o probuzení z kómatu

Several years ago, researchers showed that the film industry does a poor job representing the true nature of amnesia. According to a paper in the journal Neurologie written by neurologist Dr. Eelco Wijdicks and his son Coen Wijdicks, the film industry also portrays coma inaccurately.

The Wijdicks reviewed 30 movies that had actors pretending they were in a coma. They studied the actor-patient appearance and the cause, treatment and length of the coma. People without a medical background also viewed scenes from several movies to determine if they could identify inaccuracies in the films and whether they were influenced by what they saw.

In the 30 films, a coma was caused most often by a car crash (11 films; 33%), gunshot wound (4 films; 13%) or violent brain injury (4 films; 13%). Most of the movies (19/30, 63%) were rated R; only 7 films (23%) were rated PG-13 and 3 (10%) were rated PG. One film (3%) was not rated.

«Hollywood» comas had several problems:

Actor-patients appeared well-groomed, tanned and muscular, even after many years in a coma. Real patients in a coma often experience muscle wasting and may have bedsores from being immobile. Patients may also lose the ability to control their bladder and bowels.

Actor-patients in comas almost always had their eyes closed and appeared as if they were sleeping («Sleeping Beauty phenomenon»). Real patients often have their eyes open and have muscular contractures (tightening of muscles). Some patients require feeding tubes and a ventilator to help them breathe.

Actor-patients often awoke suddenly from their coma, sometimes in response to some event. For example, in one movie, a mosquito bite caused one patient to wake up. Immediately after awakening from a coma, actor-patients are often fully alert and moving. When real patients recover from a coma, they are often confused and require months of physical therapy.

Dream Life of Angels and Zvrat štěstěny are two films that portrayed the symptoms of a coma accurately. For example, the comatose actor-patient in Dream Life of Angels was shown with muscle contractures and feeding and breathing tubes.

Nonmedical people who viewed scenes from the films were not always able to identify inaccuracies. For example, 22 (31%) of these people believed that a person in a coma could tap out Morse code. Moreover, 28 (39%) of the nonmedical people said that the films would influence their decisions about the care of a family member in a coma.

Reference and further information:

Wijdicks, E.F.M. and Wijdicks, C.A., The portrayal of coma in contemporary motion pictures, Neurology, 66:1300-1303, 2006.
— Brain Injury Association of America
Coma — from the Neurology Channel
Neuroscience at the Movies — from Neuroscience for Kids

Examples of reviewed movies with patients in a coma:

The Movies Tell Us: What It’s Like to Be in a Coma

Ve filmu Pokud zůstanu, Chloe Grace Moretzová plays a teenage girl who winds up in a coma when she’s in a car accident with her family. As her body lies in a hospital bed, her consciousness stands to the side, able to observe what’s going on in the room. She can watch her loved ones visit, see her boyfriend play her a song. And she also flashes back to past events while contemplating whether or not she should wake up and stay alive. Her choice, apparently. Do comatose patients actually have out-of-body experiences? Some claim so, but OBEs are not really scientifically recognized, at least not as anything other than a dream.

Movies aren’t subject to the rules of accepted science, though, and that goes for depictions of comas in general. In 2006, a doctor conducted a study of 30 movies featuring comatose persons (not including Liz garbus’s solid HBO doc Kóma, made after the study) and concluded that only two of them were accurately portrayed: Zvrat štěstěny a Snový život andělů (the study is published in the medical journal “Neurology”, which you can pay to read here; but you can download the data-supplement list of movie titles here). That was mainly for what comas are like externally and for the patient afterward, however. There’s not really much to go on as far as what it’s like internally from the perspective of the person in the coma.

So, this week’s edition of The Movies Tell Us is only briefly focused on how comatose consciousness is fantastically represented in the movies, such as in the OBE aspect of Pokud zůstanu. The rest of the 10 situations below are more like what happens to you when you’re in a coma than what the experience is like to be in that state. Either way, it’s enough to make us hope to never have to find out if any of it is true or likely to be.

Situation: Your spirit travels to a limbo-like realm
Filmy: Monkeybone (2001); Zákeřný (2010)

In Monkeybone, Henry Selick’s live-action/stop-motion hybrid, the souls of comatose humans go to a twisted fantasy land called Down Town, where apparently cartoon characters you create are living and breathing. Sounds like something your subconscious would devise. In this scenario, awakening is also a matter of choice, coupled with permission from Death and an “Exit Pass.” As for Zákeřný, it’s ultimately revealed that an unresponsive boy is not technically in a coma but instead had an out-of-body experience where his spirit became trapped in a limbo dimension called “The Further,” home to tormented spirits and demons.

Situation: Your body parts are up for grabs
Filmy: Kóma (1978); Face / Off (1997)

Michael Crichton’s movie of Robin Cook’s novel “Coma” will not just make you fearful of entering a state of prolonged unconsciousness but also of entering any hospital, even for a minor operation. Patients put under at Boston Memorial are poisoned to the point of their being comatose, and then their bodies are transferred to a facility for the purpose of black market organ sales. In John WooJe Face / Off, the body part pilfered is, of course, a man’s face. When a terrorist falls into a coma, and thereby incapable of revealing information about a devastating bomb, an FBI agent has to borrow his nose, cheeks and the rest in order to go undercover at a ridiculously high security prison. Waking up from a coma without a face has to be the worst case scenario next to never waking up at all.

Situation: Your identity is up for grabs
Filmy: 18 Znovu! (1988); Dave (1993); Face / Off (1997); Monkeybone (2001); Neznámý (2011)

You’d think this happens a lot. Of course, we just noted how the comatose terrorist of Face / Off has his identity borrowed, through face theft and transplant. And there’s Monkeybone again, because in that movie a monkey manages to steal an “Exit Pass” and jump out of limbo into the body of the coma patient, passing as him for a while. In the body swap comedy 18 Znovu!, an old man takes over the body of his grandson while his own is in a comatose state. Ivan ReitmanJe Dave sees a man tasked with passing as the President of the United States when the real deal suffers a stroke that puts him in a coma. And in the recent thriller Neznámý, Liam Neeson wakes from his brief coma to find that another man has filled his shoes, his job, his marriage and the rest.

Situation: Your home is up for grabs
Filmy: Snový život andělů (1998); Stejně jako v nebi (2005)

It would be a shame to wake from a coma and find that you’ve lost your home, but that’s precisely why your home might be up for grabs, according to the movies. In the French drama Snový život andělů (one of the confirmed authentic coma films), it’s more of a sublet situation, where two women are living in the apartment of a family that almost entirely died in a car accident. The teenage daughter is still clinging to life, and one of the women keeps the connection going by visiting the comatose girl in the hospital. In the rom-com Stejně jako v nebi, a man unknowingly moves into the former apartment of a woman who is comatose and on life support (also by way of a car accident) – yet her spirit is still residing in her home, like a ghost, and he is of course the only person who can see her.

Situation: Your unpublished work is up for grabs
Film: Setkáte se s vysokým temným cizincem (2010)

V jedné z Woody Allen’s lesser recent works, a man thinks his friend has died in a car crash – if he knew the guy was simply in a coma, he might have thought twice about stealing an unpublished novel for himself. This sort of thing seems even less plausible than having a whole identity or a few body parts lifted because works of literature should be easily recognizable as the product of their true author. But similar plots do occur in other movies, such as Morvern Drž hubu, where the work is stolen from an actual dead person, and Největší táta světa, which does the inverse and has a man’s unsold manuscript passed off as his late son’s diary.

Situation: You miss the world changing around you
Filmy: Sbohem Lenin! (2003); Kickin’ It Old Skool (2007)

Imagine falling into a coma for a long enough time that the world is unrecognizable when you awaken. That’s the situation for two very different comedies from last decade. One is a brilliant play on the fall of communism in Europe. Sbohem Lenin! puts the fall of the Berlin Wall as happening while a GDR-loving old woman is in the midst of a heart attack-induced coma. Fearing that the change will literally kill her, the woman’s son leads her to believe everything is the still the same. Then there’s the jamie kennedy vozidlo Kickin’ It Old Skool, which makes a 20-year coma seem like time travel by having a guy awaken after two decades. There’s a lot of culture shock involved, but fortunately there’s also a lot of nostalgia today, allowing him to use his retro talents for modern success.

Situation: You unknowingly fall in love
Filmy: Zatímco jsi spal (1995); Stejně jako v nebi (2005)

We already established that in Stejně jako v nebi, the spirit of a comatose woman is still residing in her apartment, and a man has moved in while her body is lying in a hospital. They hit it off and fall in love, of course, because destiny. But according to this movie, when you wake from a coma you don’t remember anything you experienced in your out-of-body state, so she’s not even aware that she sorta got a boyfriend while unconscious. A boyfriend with a magic kiss that miraculously helped her wake from that coma. A decade earlier, there was Zatímco jsi spal, where due to some confusion, a woman with a crush on a man who winds up in a coma is believed to be his fiancee. And she plays along. So, he too wakes up unaware that he is in a relationship – because actually he’s not.

Situation: You are raped
Filmy: Mluvit s ní (2002); Kill Bill Volume 1 (2003); Šípková Růženka (2011)

Suddenly this guide has taken a very dark turn. Thanks to movies involving comas taking their own dark turn. The first is Pedro Almodovar’s Oscar-winning Spanish drama Mluvit s ní, in which a comatose woman is raped by her nurse and becomes pregnant as a result. A year later, we got the first part of Quentin TarantinoJe Kill Bill, which kicks off with a comatose woman being raped by clients of a nurse, one of whom has the deserved misfortune of mounting her after she has woken up. More recently there’s Julia LeighováJe Šípková Růženka, which deals with men paying for a rape fantasy with a young woman who puts herself into a deep coma-like sleep. The last one might not fully count, but it’s partly a connecting fiber in that the Charles Perrault version of the “Sleeping Beauty” fairy tale had the title character raped and impregnated while in her coma.

Situation: People will enter your body
Film: Fantastic Voyage (1966)

Yes, the way that situation is phrased makes it sound like the same thing as the prior guide entry. But this one doesn’t involve intercourse but rather a course of scientific exploration and a medical mission to save a man’s life. That man is a comatose scientist who has found a way to miniaturize people and things, such as those who use a ship to navigate the inner workings of the human body and destroy a blood clot in the scientist’s brain.

Situation: People will enter your mind
Film: Cell (2000)

In Fantastic Voyage, the little heroes are headed to the coma patient’s brain, while in the underrated Tarsem singh’s sci-fi thriller Cell, one woman is headed into a coma patient’s mind. The movie’s depiction of a person’s state while in a coma is somewhat akin to the movies where the spirit travels to another plain, but here that spirit stays put and involves as much if not more of a surreal world. And in a way, because it’s the mind of a serial killer, that world is as scary as anything seen in the demonic realm of Zákeřný. The one thing that makes this fantastical version of Mlčení jehňátek not that relevant to this guide, though, is that the concept doesn’t really need a comatose person. The killer is only in a coma so the plot can be, like Face / Off, about a race against time to get information that otherwise can’t be, because the person is in a deep unconscious state.

Christopher Campbell začal psát filmovou kritiku a pokrývat filmové festivaly pro zine s názvem číst, v době, kdy vám zine mohl získat tiskové pověření Sundance. Nyní je hlavním redaktorem ve FSR a zakládajícím redaktorem našeho sesterského webu Nonfics. Pravidelně také přispívá do Fandango a Rotten Tomatoes a je prezidentem sekce dokumentárních filmů Asociace kritiků.

waking up from a coma movies

Смотрите видео на тему «waking up from a coma movies» в TikTok (тикток).

12.3

Girl was in a coma for 20 years . #movie #tiktok #foryou #film

564.1

This sence.. #fy #fyp #senioryear #senioryearfilm #sh0rt017ed #sheknows #therealisation #netflixfilms

92.8

Senior year Tagz: #senioryear #rebelwilson #netflix #movie #foryou #foryoupage #fyp #fypシ

678.1

Movie: Fifty Shades Freed #fiftyshadesfreed #2018 #dakotajohnson #jamiedornan

3585

Riley North awakens from a coma after surviving a brutal attack that killed her husband and daughter. When the system shields the murderers from justice, Riley sets out to transform herself from citizen to urban guerrilla. Channeling frustration into motivation, the young widow spends years in hiding — honing her mind, body and spirit to become an unstoppable force. Eluding the underworld, the police and the FBI, Riley embarks on a deadly quest to deliver her own personal brand of punishment. This is that movie. I enjoyed it from beginning to end. Think the mom version of Taken. Jennifer Garner did a phenomenal job at playing a grief stricken mom/wife wanting justice for her family. If you like action packed films this is the movie for you. Definitely recommend adding Peppermint to your weekend watchlist. Streaming on Netflix Rating 9.75/10 #peppermint #peppermintmovie #fyp #netflix #moviesonnetflix #netflixandchill #actionmovie #thrillermovie #foryoupage #mustwatch #watchlist #movienight #moviereview #movierecommendation

We collect Movies about Waking up from a coma rating based on ratings and reviews on popular services. To collect Movies about Waking up from a coma we analyze rendition, popular services, comments, people reviews, forum comments and make our own rating. If you think there is a movie missing in the selection, you can leave a comment with the name of the movie that should be included in the selection. Let’s make a rating Movies about Waking up from a coma together!