A dinner-party-from-hell movie, a multiverse movie, Coherence deftly manages to be both, as if one of Luis Buñuel’s torture-the-bourgeoisie dramas from the 1960s had teleported to 50 years in the future.
Coherence was released in 2013 to the odd handclap from festivals specialising in the left-field but it’s only now over a decade later that it seems to be getting more namechecks. And with films like Parallel Forest, or Parallel, its remake, in its thrall to an extent, that’s understandable.
So, James Ward Byrkit wanted to make a feature but had no money to speak of. But thanks to a career in the movie biz (he wrote the story to Rango, for instance) he did have contacts and a house he could use as a set – his own. Gathering together eight main actors and a few others to play their doubles, he shot his film over five nights, with a skeleton crew and on a tiny budget, relying on his actors to improvise scenarios he’d hand them on bits of paper when they turned up to perform. No rehearsal, no “what is my motivation” – seat-of-the-pants acting.
You can tell his actors are discombobulated, occasionally, but for the most part Byrkit gets away with it, thanks to a forgivingly shaky, almost nausea-inducing camera that conveys the decay as a nice dinner party for friends who all know each other well – jokes, indiscretions, sharing of career highs and lows since they last met – gradually morphs into a frenzy of suspicion and psychosis.
It is all due to a comet passing overhead, so Byrkit’s story goes, which is causing a disturbance in the normal order of things. At first just a cracked iPhone screen. Later the internet going down and the power going out before copies of one or other of the guests start arriving, who might all have come from a similar dinner party in another version of the same house just down the road.
Byrkit largely keeps the focus on blonde, comet-knowledgeable, possibly-the-most-adult-person-there Em (Emily Baldoni), who provides ballast and good sense (it’s all relative) as things get jumbled and as multiple not-quite-exactly-the-same copies of the guests cause skeletons to be rattled.
Watch very closely as early breadcrumb trails are laid – a table-tennis racquet, one of the invitees having a wound dressed, the wearing of wedding rings, cracked or not cracked phone screens – because Byrkit will be back later asking questions. Like is this the same Mike, or Lee, or Hugh, Beth, Amir or Kevin that we were watching earlier? Is this the same house? How many alternate realities are in play here? Is the early distribution of glow sticks – blue ones – to help us identify the different groups of people or to confuse us even more?
You will recognise Nicholas Brendon from 145 episodes of Buffy, if you watched it, but the cast is largely unfamiliar, though they’re plausibly a group of old friends, even though the actors mostly did not know each other when their five-day adventure started.
Jitter-inducing is the best way to describe it, the way Byrkit and his two cinematographers (Arlene Muller, Nic Sadler) light it (dark) and shoot it (shaky as hell) and the way the actors play it, though they are reacting to scenarios that they’re often learning about right as we’re watching.
For the lovers of the alternate universe thing, Schrödinger’s cat gets a reference, and there’s mention of quantum decoherence as an attempt to explain things, but also the movie Sliding Doors, in case you’re more Gwyneth Paltrow than Nobel Prize-winning quantum theoretician.
I thought Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel – more fancy people trapped in a scenario that’s at least 50 per cent a nightmare of their own making – though that was more allegorical. Here, in Twilight Zone style, the situation plays out as the situation, not as a placeholder for something else. And it does not end well. Oh no.
Coherence – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
