Coherence

Schrödinger’s
Collision

Coherence
USA/UK 2013
Directed by James Ward Byrkit
101 Films

Warning: Some spoilerage... would suggest going in blind if you want to watch this.

Coherence is one of those movies I saw mentioned on my Twitter feed by someone and it looked kind of intriguing. So I thought I’d check it out and found that, yeah, this is one of those movies I wish I’d seen at the cinema. It’s great... and I’m glad I really didn’t know anything about it when I went in.

The whole film, aside from some brief outside locations scattered throughout, all takes place on one evening in one house. Eight friends played by Emily Foxler, Maury Sterling, Nicholas Brendon, Elizabeth Gracen, Lorene Scafaria, Hugo Armstrong, Alex Manugian and Lauren Maher are gathered at a dinner. It’s also the same night that a strange comet is supposed to be passing us but the brother of the character played by Hugo Armstrong, being a physicist, has told him to stay in the house and just try to contact him if anything strange should happen when the comet passes over.

Sure enough, the comet starts its voyage through the sky but even before this, things seem a little off. People’s phone screens, for example, are shattering for no apparent reasons and very soon, the house is left without power or any outside communication. And it looks like it’s the same for almost everyone, not that there are any people or cars on the streets (other than those the guests arrived in)... except for a house a few blocks over where all the lights have come on. So two of the group go out to see what’s going on. When they do, a bang is heard as someone is knocking to get into the house where the dinner party is being held. 

However, when the two return, one has sustained an injury and the other is carrying a mysterious box which they absconded with from the other house. The box has everyone’s photo in it with a number written on the back. Not only that, the injured party says he looked into the windows of the other house, which is identical to their own... and saw this dinner party. Wanting to solve the situation, one of the characters writes a note asking if they can borrow the landline from the other house but, as he finishes writing it, there’s some commotion out by the front door and when they check, the exact same note he has just written has been left outside this house.

From then on in, due to the characters not acting sensibly in any way (a much used trope of the horror genre but, in this case it’s bleeding over into a science fiction film instead), things start getting wilder and wilder and, at some point, someone realises that the various people she is with all started off in different versions of the houses... from myriad parallel dimensions.

And it’s a rich text with references to a 1923 comet in Finland (which I don’t totally trust), the Tunguska event, Schrödinger’s cat and even one of the characters playing an actor from the Roswell TV series... when he clearly didn’t in real life so... yeah, it’s a film which makes much play of the flip side of reality and versions of realities, even down to some of the stories the characters tell at the dinner party before things start getting... well... multiversal.

The film has a nice style to it, too... with very much a ‘fly on the wall’ type of hand held camera being used, almost at odds with the well lit, richly coloured widescreen frames favoured by the director. It’s also got a nice editing style where the scenes will segue by literally just cutting to a second or two of blacknesss before folding back into another conversation. And the reason for that is, I suspect, because it turns out the film was shot in only five nights and uses a lot of ‘on the spot’, improvised dialogue. Indeed, it turns out that the whole film’s dialogue was improvised by the actors who were each given personal objectives by the director, which they had to try and fulfil as they shot, scene by scene, in the order of the story itself. It says much about the skill of the actors, of course, that I didn’t realise the film was not properly scripted for dialogue and it’s this modus operandi which, naturally, serendipitously leads to the way dangling conversations are just cut short and then rejoined somewhere else... because whole chunks of 45 minute improvisations were cut if the direction the writers needed to fulfil was either not quite going where they needed it to or, indeed, were just taking too long to get there.

And bearing in mind the small, improvisational, very talky script, you have to hand it to composer Kristin Øhrn Dyrud for providing a score which, not only is often somewhat minimalistic while still able to compete easily with the dense rush of the conversation pieces... but, somehow also able to give some slow burn, unsettling moments which act almost as musical stingers to underline each minor revelation as characters discover that different layers of perceived reality are beginning to bleed into each other’s universe. Such a shame, then, that there isn’t a proper CD release of the score... just an electronic download.

So there you have it. Coherence is... well it is a somewhat intelligent movie but it’s also ferociously entertaining (not that intelligence should exclude that) and features some good, solid acting from the key performers. It also, once you start thinking back about certain things which happen or are revealed, doesn’t quite make sense unless something was already going on before the narrative even opens. I thought this one was pretty good and I shall certainly be recommending it to some of my friends at some point soon.