![]() Byrkit doesn’t spend much time satisfying the horror movie clichés, aside from unusual noises, but instead builds tension with the characters at his disposal. A house down the street still has power and a couple of the guys from the group decide to investigate. ![]() It’s impressive that all these qualities are found in a low-budget first feature that mostly takes shape in one location.Ī group of friends gather for dinner the same night a comet passes Earth, this renders power outages and loss of cellular service. ![]() It’s not hard to identify the plethora of genre films that embody these narrative elements on display. Director James Ward Byrkit mixes his film with a little bit of both science fiction and horror a passing comet that hints at the introduction familiar to many zombie and alien invasion films, “Twilight Zone” storytelling aspects, and the psychological effects imposed on a group of friends forced into survival mentality. Whether reassembling its pieces into a coherent whole will inspire any deeper thoughts is the question.Starring: Emily Foxler, Maury Sterling, Nicholas Brendan, Elizabeth Gracen, Lorene Scafaria, and Hugo Armstrongīy Monte Yazzie ( “Coherence” is a puzzle of a science fiction film. The film invites multiple viewings by doing ingenious tricks with our assumptions about where - and who - the characters are at any given point. That makes a kind of meta-sense, given that we live in a culture where virtually nothing weird can happen without somebody comparing it to a specific episode of "The Twilight Zone" or "The X-Files." Why freak out when you can explain and analyze? And Coherence is sure to inspire viewer analysis - lots of it. While Coherence takes the superficial form of a horror movie, it's ultimately too talky to be scary. The improvised conversations are chaotic and full of overtalking, which serves the film well at the beginning - mundane chatter lulling us into a sense of security - but undermines it toward the end, when that same chatter merely distracts us from moments of potential dread and awe. The evening's events push both characters toward a breaking point.Ĭoherence often feels like a found-footage movie where the cameraman isn't acknowledged, or a bizarre stage play - even the incisive editing takes the form of sudden blackouts. 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. She's facing a big choice about her relationship with her boyfriend (Maury Sterling), and it doesn't help when his glamorous ex (Lauren Maher) shows up. Protagonist Em (Emily Baldoni) is already uncomfortable at the gathering before the weirdness starts. ![]() He gives the well-worn tropes new life by avoiding fantastical excess, keeping the focus on how the strange phenomena affect the relationships among his characters. Yet Byrkit devises a plot that keeps us guessing. In short, the concepts at play in Coherence are far from original, and the film's exposition of them far from elegant. His characters even reference a previous film that drew on such watered-down multiverse theories, the rom com Sliding Doors. Byrkit has updated the paranoia for a time in which well-read people easily bandy about terms such as "quantum uncertainty" and "Schrödinger's cat," and alternate-reality scenarios are common currency. The scenario recalls the classic "Twilight Zone" episode "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street," in which a group of McCarthy-era suburbanites isolated by a power outage discovers that the monsters they fear are actually. ![]() There they make the first in a series of deeply unsettling discoveries. When the power goes out, they grab glowsticks and venture over to a neighbor's house where lights still blaze. When their cellphone screens and a wine glass mysteriously shatter, they laugh nervously. It was shot over a few nights with eight actors, improvised dialogue and a handheld anti-aesthetic, yet it endeavors to broach some of the Big Questions about how we become the people we are (or think we are).įour couples meet for a dinner party as a comet cleaves the sky overhead. Unseen on Vermont screens, but currently available on various streaming services, Coherence is worth a look for the sheer contrast between the audacity of its conceit and the minimalism of its means. Coherence, the debut feature from writer-director James Ward Byrkit, earns a spot there, too. I would place Primer and Memento on that list. Movie critics like to throw around terms like "mind bending," but few films are really so disorienting that they inspire and reward multiple viewings just to figure out what the hell happened. ![]()
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