Coherence

a good movie

Smart movies are hard to come by. They don’t need to be oh-so-clever to qualify for me, or mind puzzlers. (I liked Primer but I needed to read the Wikipedia page, which made it too smart for me.) The sweet spot for me is somewhere between Arrival and Annihilation and Nine Days and After Life, where you have some thinking to do, and the discussions you have after the movie is over are almost as entertaining as the movies themselves. Coherence, released in 2013 and directed by James Ward Byrkit, hits that sweet spot for me without expensive special effects or Hollywood star power.

I think one of you recommended this movie to me after I talked about another low budget film with a cult following, The Man from Earth. I can’t find the post where I wrote about it, thanks to Substack’s crap search function, but it’s a one-room story about a college professor who confesses to his colleagues that he’s actually an immortal who was born in the paleolithic period. That movie mostly functions through dialogue, but makes for an interesting evening. Coherence is similar in that it begins with a dinner party on the night a comet passes close to Earth.

Eight people who know one another, who are smart and enjoying themselves with food and wine, when the power goes out. Also, the internet. They are the kind of people who don’t have a TV, which blessedly reprieves us from seeing the news about the comet. It’s all told through dialogue and by seeing it outside. All the houses in the area are dark, except for one. Hugh has a brother who is a theoretical physicist, who told him to “call if anything weird happens tonight.”

They find a box of blue glow sticks and two of the men go to walk to the house to see if they have a landline, so they can call Hugh’s brother. They return, one with a cut on his forehead, and obviously shaken. The house looks like theirs, but it was empty. They went inside and found a lockbox, which they open.

Inside are photos of them. And they are numbered.

Now this sounds like a setup for a slasher movie, but it’s not. The others want to see the house, and they go… until they see four people with red glow sticks in the yard. Both groups are spooked, and ours returns to the house. There’s an unopened box of red glow sticks as well as the blue ones they used. Hugh decides to write a note to the other house, warning them not to come in; when he goes to put it on the front door… the note is already there.

Between this, and a physics book Hugh has in the car, they figure out that the other house is an alternate version of theirs; the comet has somehow caused quantum decoherence, or a split reality where they can affect each other. Following the theory, one reality will collapse once the comet passes.

The movie unfolds naturally and doesn’t feel plotted mechanically; it has a palindromic quality, as Emily puts together the lock box with photos and random numbers so they can mark which house is “the original.” And one house seems to have the worst outcomes. Emily explores and finds at least three more, as their decisions have split off into multiple realities… so what now? Things start to get really interesting as some try to game their way into the surviving reality.

I was stunned to read that the director only wrote a treatment and not a script; he used actors with improvisation backgrounds and gave them notes each day with their motivations, and let the story unfold. For me, the movie was compelling for all of its ninety minutes. No one does anything stupid or obviously contrived to drive the plot. You can watch Coherence on several streaming services, including my favorite, Kanopy, which is free with some library cards.

Watch it, and tell me what you think!