Coherence (2014)
Directed by James Ward Byrkit
Four couples gather for dinner the night a mysterious and powerful comet passes overhead.
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27 films that influenced Coherence
What critics say influenced Coherence
It does for quantum physics what Primer did for time travel.
Shane Carruth came up a bit earlier in the conversation, and Coherence should certainly be filed on the shelf next to Primer – this film has a similar uneasiness in its tone, also achieved by way of what-the-fuck-is-going-on style plotting.
It’s the way co-writer-director James Ward Byrkit — a longtime Gore Verbinski collaborator — focuses not on brainiacs, as in “Primer,” but on smart but mostly under-informed NPR types, who know enough to slowly piece all this together but not enough that they don’t usually descend into blabbering, shouting and drinking.
Although Byrkit confines his actors and his largely unscripted story to the house, “Coherence” soon reveals its true setting to be some nocturnal twilight zone located at the juncture of Luis Bunuel’s “The Exterminating Angel,” Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia” and Shane Carruth’s “Primer,” all superior exercises in cine-surrealism.
The idea-based ones, such as Primer or Moon , are often low-budget, set in simple, limited locations, and using concepts rather than computer effects.
I would place Primer and Memento on that list.
As one guest notes, you saw Gwyneth Paltrow’s “Sliding Doors” (1998), it’s somewhat the same paradox.
If that sounds unbearably erudite, writer-director James Ward Byrkit offsets the headiness with drollness, such as a reference to the 1998 Gwyneth Paltrow rom-com Sliding Doors.
His characters even reference a previous film that drew on such watered-down multiverse theories, the rom com Sliding Doors.
However, there's one lone house in the neighbourhood that still has its lights on, and the friends discover that its inhabitants look strangely familiar... Writer/director James Ward Byrkit has basically taken a Twilight Zone episode and stretched it to feature length - the mind-bending plot invokes both Sliding Doors and the Schrödinger's cat paradox as the guests grapple with potential parallel realities.
At one point, when everyone’s trying to figure out what the hell is going on, Laurie brings up Sliding Doors, the Gwyneth Paltrow movie about two alternate realities that diverge based on whether the heroine boards or just misses a train.
Writer/director James Ward Byrkit, in his feature debut, achieves effective chills with only eight actors and a living room, intermixing quantum physics (shout-outs range from Schrödinger’s cat to “Sliding Doors”) with the very mundane human tendency toward bad judgment calls in a crisis.
Shadows of The Twilight Zone and Another Earth hang over this impressively stripped-down, experimental sci-fi about a dinner party that fractures into alternative realities thanks to a mysterious comet.
Not long ago Mike Cahill gave us “Another Earth,” about a mirror planet to our own, and now we have James Ward Byrkit’s “Coherence,” a micro-budget affair that reduces the phenomenon to the neighborhood level.
There's a superficial similarity to Another Earth, in that it deals with parallel existences.
(With her blonde locks, it’s not hard to see her as the equivalent of Brit Marling in a version of Another Earth that actually turns out to be interesting.)
Shane Carruth's cerebral mind-bender Primer and Mike Cahill's lo-fi astrological fable Another Earth are obvious reference points too.
If you’re into indie sci-fi in the vein of “Primer” or “Another Earth,” where the thrills up the spine come from ideas rather than visual effects, get a ticket now to see James Byrkit’s mindbender “Coherence.”
In addition to being exactly the kind of pop-culture reference these characters might actually make in this situation, it’s exceedingly sly, because Sliding Doors—like Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blind Chance, which it strongly resembles—is about, well, blind chance.
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If the initial premise of Byrkit’s high-concept, quantum mechanics-driven narrative is slightly difficult to swallow, that’s only because a comet passing near Earth—and resulting in all sorts of supernatural phenomenon—rings of the deus ex machina that marred even good or great films by master directors, namely von Trier’s Melancholia and Abel Ferrara’s 4:44 Last Day on Earth .
Call it Home-Based Sci-Fi: From 2006's Right at Your Door to 2012's It's a Disaster, these movies evoke apocalypse but never actually leave the dining room.
Em (Emily Foxler) is more concerned about the presence of Laurie (Lauren Maher), a “vixen-y” type who used to go out with Em’s boyfriend Kevin (Maury Sterling), while Beth (Elizabeth Gracen) complains about the bad feng shui related to the house’s “door to nowhere,” and actor Mike (Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s Nicholas Brendon) handles the humiliation of not being recognized by a fan of a TV show on which he starred.
Fans of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” will remember Nicholas Brendon as Xander Harris.
There’s enough latent resentment in this group dynamic to fuel a straightforward indie drama, and Coherence initially fits that bill quite snugly, its largely unknown cast—the most familiar face is Nicholas Brendon, of Buffy The Vampire Slayer—spewing improvised, overlapping dialogue in front of a jittery, handheld lens.
The most recognizable face on Coherence belongs to Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Nicholas Brendon, as the host of the dinner party, but there's not a weak link in the entire cast -- and that really helps once Coherence progresses from a clever but talky concept into a full-bore story that keeps its wheels spinning while also getting enjoyably confusing once or twice.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer alum Brendon is probably one of the more recognizable names in Coherence and does an excellent job of shedding away any Xander Harris remnants that long-time fans may still be holding onto.
Mike (Nicholas Brendon of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"), the party's host, is a recovering alcoholic who worries that stress will release his inner drunk.
James Ward Byrkit’s sci-fi thriller “Coherence” starts as an updated comedy of manners like Luis Buñuel’s “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” and ends like something from Alfred Hitchcock.
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Its transformation of mundane interactions into something otherworldly actually reminded me of another brilliant, lesser-known sci-fi film from a couple of years ago, Spanish director Nacho Vigalondo’s Extraterrestrial .
There's some "Memento" -ish fun in navigating the characters' tricky plans to keep their timeline safe from now-feared doppelgangers.
Like the better episodes of The Twilight Zone, Christopher Nolan’s Memento and Shane Carruth’s Primer before it, indie sci-fi Coherence is a brilliantly staged and sharply written mindscrew of a movie that left me equal parts giddy, chilled and bewildered.
I would place Primer and Memento on that list.