Coherence full movie series#

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. Suffice to say that while the story’s revelations are diverting enough, the implications are sometimes chilling for the wrong reasons: The idea that we might be stuck in an eternal loop (or “roulette wheel,” as one character calls it) with some of the movie’s more insufferable characters - Mike with his boozy, knuckleheaded ideas, Beth with her feng shui and her ketamine-and-valerian cocktails - is indeed a disquieting one to contemplate.The setup has the deceptively familiar feel of a classic stage play.

Coherence full movie series#

Once more we find ourselves at a dinner party whose guests find themselves hard pressed to escape, thanks largely to complications provided by an invasive celestial body and a series of … well, to say more would spoil the modest fun. There are playful early hints of what’s to come: Em shares a story about her past experience as a dancer that leads to a pointed conversation about parallel lives and stolen destinies Mike, it turns out, once starred on the sci-fi series “Roswell.” And in short order, accompanied by the foreboding shudder of Kristin Ohrn Dyrud’s minimalist score, the comet makes its big entrance, shutting down everyone’s cell phones and causing a massive power outage - a minor inconvenience compared with the Moebius-strip craziness of what happens next.Īlthough 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. Byrkit sets the scene and the table nicely enough, establishing a warm candlelit atmosphere of friendly chit-chat and vaguely discernible tension, even if his storytelling choices - overlapping dialogue, banal digressions, excessively wobbly camerawork, extreme closeups and jagged editing - at times strain too hard for authenticity.īut then, perhaps the fragmented indie roughness of it all - particularly the way editor Lance Pereira ends nearly every scene with an abrupt cut to black - is meant to signify a deeper rift in the film’s universe. Arriving one fateful evening at the cozy suburban home of acerbic actor Mike (Nicholas Brendon) and his affable wife, Lee (Lorene Scafaria), pretty Em (Emily Foxler) is the closest figure to a protagonist in a group that also includes her boyfriend, Kevin (Maury Sterling) older married couple Hugh (Hugo Armstrong) and Beth (Elizabeth Gracen) and the annoying Amir (Alex Manugian), who has thoughtlessly brought along one of Kevin’s exes, Laurie (Lauren Maher), as his date.