Coherence, 2013.
Directed by James Ward Byrkit.
Starring Emily Foxler, Nicholas Brendon, Maury Sterling, Lorene Scafaria, Elizabeth Gracen, Hugo Armstrong, Lauren Maher and Alex Manugian.
SYNOPSIS:
On the night a comet is passing near Earth, a dinner party takes an odd turn. When the power goes out, eight friends discover that the only house on the street left with power also holds many secrets.
Coherence is a tremendously difficult film to describe without the help of some diagrams and a great deal of time, so it’s best to keep it simple. Eight friends meet at a dinner party (though for various reasons some of them don’t like each other all that much) a comet flies overhead, and then everything gets weird. In essence, the comet creates multiple versions of the house and the friends at the party. The film explains itself with the analogy of Schrodinger’s cat, where a cat placed in a box with poison is simultaneously dead and alive until the box is opened. Here, they are the cat, the comet is the box, and the possibilities are not dead or alive, but infinite versions of their reality.
If that sounds convoluted, that’s because it is, and Coherence makes no attempt to hold your hand through any of it. What starts as a mysterious home-invasion thriller soon becomes a soap-opera spanning multiple dimensions, as attempts to tackle the more obvious concerns of the situation are eschewed in favour of an exploration into the relationships and fractured lives of the principal characters. narratively, it becomes nigh on impossible to follow, but this seems largely intentional. It reaches the point where we don’t know which characters are from which reality, and how much of their ‘original’ self is still there. The film meanders towards a comment on human-relationships, and the multiple, minute components of which they comprise. For much of the film, the relationship talk is a little tedious, and considering the nature of the situation they find themselves in, it hardly rings true.
There’s still much to like about Coherence, particularly in it’s early stages. it’s unwillingness to reveal anything in the first act lends the film an effective sense of mystery and confusion, though this too is somewhat undercut by the incredibly fortuitous discovery of a book about the very situation they find themselves in. The performances are uniformly excellent, and the dialogue seems at least partially improvised, and it’s perhaps because of this that the film is able to maintain a semblance of realism amongst absurd developments. It may not seem like praise, but the cast do an excellent job of making the attendees of this dinner party almost instantly detestable. For anyone wondering how a smug dinner party would react to an incomprehensible shift in reality, Coherence probably comes quite close to the truth of it: As infinite versions of themselves switch between houses, each and every one of them finds the time for a talk about their relationship troubles, and they all have relationship troubles.
There’s a lot to be said for filmmaking of this ambition on this scale, and the comparisons to films like Another Earth and Primer are inevitable. All three found their own ways to tell impossible stories with next to no budget. It’s to the credit of writer/director Byrkit that Coherence sets it’s parameters so tightly early on, so it never feels like we’re missing any of the action. The whole film plays out in one living room, but rather than hindering the story this works to add another layer of claustrophobia and confusion, particularly when the other houses start to appear.
The premise of a romantic drama alongside mind-bending science fiction is a brave one, though, and by the final scene Coherence just about lives up to it. The narrative descends to the point of total incomprehensibility, and the shift of focus from the group to a single protagonist towards the end is a little jarring, but for the most part, Coherence works.
Flickering Myth Rating: Film ★ ★ ★ / Movie ★ ★ ★
Jake Wardle
Originally published October 10, 2013. Updated April 11, 2018.
