Coherence

COHERENCE is a fun, twisty tale about eight friends at a party, who are caught up in a quantum quagmire when a mysterious comet passes overhead. Their festivities fizzle when things begin to get complicated, confusing, and dangerous. As the characters attempt to extricate themselves from a knot of converging realities, their actions seem to only make matters worse.

Is there any way out of their ponderous predicament?

The film's impromptu-style dialogue adds to the sense of realism. Though the science may be "far-fetched", the story is engaging and quite entertaining, and -probably- wasn't meant as a physics lesson...

Although the trailer peeked my interest, I didn't go into this movie with high expectations, being that it is a low budget film with actors you don't see to much. But I couldn't have been more wrong.

The movie has good writing, dialog, all around great acting, and keeps you interested with nice twists throughout the movie. Another thing I liked about it, was the fact that they don't spend unnecessary amounts of time getting into the actual story. Maybe 5 or 10 minutes tops. It also has a storyline that is pretty original in my opinion. Yea, certain little things could be associated with other movies, but overall its an original idea. Sci-Fi movies these days tend to have so many similarities, that when a movie like this comes along, its refreshing to see something new.

Coherence kept popping up on lists of best sci-fi films which was surprising because I had never seen a trailer or heard anything about it. I found it free to stream somewhere, so I checked it out, and I am so glad I did! What I found was a very low-budget film with a cast you have never heard of but a premise and script that were so well executed that this movie blew my mind! The panic and anxiety of the characters as they try to understand what is happening around them is told with such brilliance that the audience is lost, intrigued, overwhelmed, and bought in all at the same time. I'm telling you - watch this movie!

Eight friends get together for dinner while a comet is passing overhead. After a power blackout across the neighbourhood strange events start occurring.

A clever drama, with an interesting anchoring in scientific theory. Very intriguing, as the events unfold, especially as you don't know where this could or will lead. Due to the originality of the concept and plot, the options are almost endless.

Unfortunately, that's where the movie falls short of greatness. Having presented this wonderfully original idea and developed the plot quite well around it, writer-director James Ward Byrkit doesn't quite know where to go with it. The ending is very disappointing, especially after all the potential the movie had for something profound or impactful.

A group of friends in LA come together for a dinner party on the same night as a comet is going to be passing close to Earth. Warned of potentially odd events, the group is bemused by the loss of phone signals, and the occasional cracked handset, but a little more freaked out by the loss of power to pretty much the entire neighborhood. One of the group, Hugh, has a brother who works in the field of astrophysics and had suggested weirdness may occur – so Hugh and Amir head out to the only house in the area they can see with power, hoping to find a working telephone to contact him on. However, while they are out, other weirdness starts to occur.

Several years since it was made, this very low budget film arrives in the UK with only a few screenings in London that I know of. I had never heard about it till I saw some positive reviews in the paper, and reading about it afterwards (as you will) I learnt that it was shot in only 5 nights pretty much using the director's own front room as the set. This does show in the final film – not that it is cheaply made, but that it is a sci-fi where the ideas are the thing rather than big special effects or anything like this. It is said that the best sci- fi are about ideas and I would say this is often the case, when they are done well; fortunately Coherence is a film that (mostly) does it well.

Not to say much, but there are elements here that will be familiar to anyone who has seen time-travel films with alternate versions, or anything in Twilight Zone/Outer Limits involving alternate universes. Going online you will find lots of discussions about the film including a great thread here on IMDb where someone has broken down the entire film into diagram showing all the time-lines in more detail than I would guess even the makers ever did; however this is not to say that the film cannot be enjoy at a more reasonable level. I found it very nicely delivered so that we are pretty much our group the whole time in terms of their understanding of events – sometimes I was behind the plot, sometimes a little ahead of it, but mostly it kept me engaged and keen to see what happened. A few jump scares and loud noises are used to perhaps raise tension artificially early on, but otherwise the film manages to use the closed location and small group to increase tension and fear of the unknown throughout, making it enjoyable.

As an idea it is not perfect and you will find flaws if you pull at the edges, however I found it satisfyingly constructed and delivered. Some have complained about the camera-work and to a point I can understand the question as to why it needed to move around so much in a comparatively static area; however I found that to a point it helped put me in the room with the characters. This doesn't totally excuse some of the more amateur aspects of the look of the film, with so-so lighting and changeable color – although a perhaps accidental impact of this is that it also made me question where I was in the film. I was a bit surprised to see some complain about the acting, because actually I thought the unknown cast was very good. I bought into them as a dinner party group of artists and Los Angeles successes, and I thought they stuck well with their characters even as odd things happen; okay none of them coped well with some of the clunkier moments (the book was not the best way to bring exposition into the film) but otherwise they worked well.

Coherence is not as good as you have heard, but it is a very enjoyable film nonetheless – I think part of the high praise it receives is that it is a low-budget film that delivers much more than most viewers would expect. I found it mostly cleverly written and well delivered to draw the viewer in, give plenty of mystery and tension, and generally satisfy throughout and at the end. The low- budget nature of it does show, and the writing is not as perfect as it appears, but for 90 minutes I really enjoyed it and appreciated how engaged I was by what it was doing.