Director James Ward Byrkit’s 2013 film, COHERENCE, is a sci-fi thriller guaranteed to blow your mind and leave you unsettled for days to come. Since it is nearly impossible to write about this film without spoiling it, I recommend watching it right now. What is so incredible about this film is that its “flaws” only serve to make it more flawless of an experience. For a largely budgetless film with an almost entirely improvised script, the actors’ stellar performances combined with some handheld camera magic serve to create a film so tense that its mind-bending concept is almost overshadowed by the gut-wrenching, visceral power it holds.
COHERENCE opens as Emily Baldoni’s Em arrives at a dinner party in the wake of Miller’s comet passing closely over the earth’s atmosphere. The comet almost becomes a character of its own, an astrological boogeyman of sorts, as Em documents strange historical occurrences during comet passings’ past. Dinner conversation quickly shifts, however, as various tensions within the friend group bubble to the surface. Sardonic and passive aggressive references to past relationships, affairs, addictions, and career failings bounce between the party guests as harsh smash-cuts in the editing break up the hyper-realistic dialogue. Yet the stakes quickly rise with the inexplicable loss of all cell service, internet, and electricity, attributed to the comet’s influence.
As freaky events unfold concerning an identical house down the street, COHERENCE quickly reveals the double meaning behind the line “we can’t trust ourselves.” While the characters attempt to make sense of the physics of the “decoherence” they are experiencing, the ‘novum’ of Schrodinger's Cat-like alternate realities is almost entirely beyond the comprehension of characters and viewers alike. COHERENCE dives deeply into what it really means to ‘confront yourself,’ and how to deal with the realization that you may be your own dark alter ego. Human logic and reason can only go so far to combat the forces of physics, when parallel universes are splitting at the seams. COHERENCE effortlessly balances the both dichotomies of fate and free will, and the horrific with the scientific.
Yet most fascinating in this film, is to simply observe the characters’ interactions with each other, and their own internal struggles, even as reality breaks down around them. When one’s closest friends and partner may not actually be who they say they are, what meaning can trust and intimacy truly hold? And if given the choice to leave your own reality, and take the place of yourself in a ‘better’ one, is it worth the risk? COHERENCE forces its audience to confront these questions and more, through a SF event that takes place in a world directly resembling our own. COHERENCE not only suggests that people have little understanding of what space-time may in fact be capable of, but that we also lack understanding of what we are capable of ourselves.
