We have this set up used in films like The Invitation, The Overnight, and It’s A Disaster. As tensions rise so does paranoia, and the people gathered that evening begin to turn on each other.Ĭoherence immediately reminded me of a strange trend in some indie movies of the last few years: The Los Angeles dinner party. A lockbox is found at the other house with numbered photos of all the party guests. Two people go to investigate, and things get stranger and stranger. Everything goes wrong with the power shuts off, and the guests notice one house down the road as the only building with any light. Reports are coming out of people’s smartphone screens spontaneously cracking, and one party guest has a brother who is a physicist and warn that strange electromagnetic phenomena could occur. Long after its tortuous plot twists fade, this dark journey through the looking glass will continue to haunt you.Written by James Ward Byrkit & Alex ManugianĮmily arrives at a dinner party at a friend’s house where conversation quickly turns to the historic passing of a comet over the United States that evening. It perhaps works best as a cautionary allegory about the paths we choose in life, and the alternative selves we sometimes dream of becoming. The ending also feels a little sensationalized, degenerating too quickly into violence, blackmail and unwittingly comic confessions of infidelity: “Even if there are a million different realities, I have slept with your wife in every one of them!”īut whatever its minor imperfections, Coherence is a thought-provoking and well-crafted experiment in zero-budget sci-fi. The overly neat manner in which the characters figure out their warped new reality, via a quantum physics textbook that somebody just happens to bring to the party, is a stagey contrivance.
#Movie coherence plus
The audience viewpoint is best embodied by Em, played by Swedish-born beauty Emily Baldoni, the outsider of the group who eventually resorts to extreme measures in order to survive.Ĭoherence demands patience and concentration from the viewer, plus leaps of faith that some will find implausible. Shooting in chronological sequence, Byrkit only gave his cast limited information about the narrative loops and swerves ahead, encouraging a semi-improvised naturalism that feels authentically tense.
#Movie coherence full
Kristin Ohrn Dyrud‘s minimal score, full of drones and moans, amplifies the sense of creeping dread. Making a virtue of its limited resources, Coherence is shot in a hand-held, claustrophobic, focus-blurring style that manages to look both glossy and raw. Connoisseurs of vintage sci-fi might also cite Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the original Solaris and the cult British space shocker Journey to the Far Side of the Sun (aka Doppelganger). Shane Carruth‘s cerebral mind-bender Primer and Mike Cahill‘s lo-fi astrological fable Another Earth are obvious reference points too. What would happen if the borders between those alternate realities began to blur? If we ran into happier, smarter version of ourselves, might we even resort to killing them and taking their place?īyrkit cites The Twilight Zone as a key influence on Coherence. Too much plot detail risks giving away spoilers here, but Byrkit milks maximum suspense from theoretical physics ideas about “quantum decoherence,” notably the increasingly fashionable concept of parallel universes co-existing simultaneously, populated by multiple versions of ourselves. It slowly becomes clear that the fabric of reality has been radically remixed by the comet’s arrival. Electricity is soon restored inside the house, but outside the world remains in darkness. Marital tensions and sexual secrets sizzle just below the surface, but relationship drama is soon overshadowed by astrological weirdness when a comet passes close to Earth, shutting down power supplies and phone connections. A group of eight friends gather for dinner on the edge of an unnamed U.S. The setup has the deceptively familiar feel of a classic stage play.
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