With the barest outline, each character was moved through the maze of a story, as it were, improvising lines as they went. Apparently, a 12-page treatment was available only to the director and his crew, not the actors they were given notecards each night (the film took five nights to film) with their character’s motivations written on them and that’s it. To that end, the “script” is also perfect, such as it was.These people feel like they’re really friends, really lovers, really in this situation. The immediate camaraderie is impressive and without a doubt one of the driving features of the film. It helps that these characters were all friends of the director, and thus probably at least passingly familiar with one another. Major spoilers ahead – you’ve been warned. So I thought I’d go into some of the deeper reasons why I thought the film worked, but also to detail what didn’t work. And that’s largely how this conversation goes. Variety was largely critical of the film Vulture called it the best sci-fi movie in years. The film holds a 91% rating on Google, 87% from Rotten Tomatoes, 7.2/10 on IMDb, and only 65% from Metacritic. But in the aftermath of time travel shows like Netflix’s DARK and the theoretical rabbit holes that I’ve been falling down since Twin Peaks ended regarding multiverses and the quantum nature of reality, it’s hard not to sit up and take notice when a film like this crosses my path.īut it’s not for everyone. I wasn’t expecting to enjoy this film as much as I did. What follows is a mind-bending hour of twists and turns involving parallel universes, multiple realities, and a smart blending of actual scientific and mathematical theories and concepts (Schrodinger’s cat, the broadest strokes of quantum physics, and decoherence, the concept from which the film takes its name) with traditional horror film tropes (jump scares, doppelangers, a murder mystery…maybe?) and some truly deep philosophical concepts (What is reality? How do we know what’s real? Who am I? What is my life anyway?) to make a wholly original film. Spooky figures appear at the doors and windows, notes are left on the porch, and the only other house on the street with its lights on has more to it than meets the eye. That right there is enough to get any Millennial’s heart racing, but when the lights go out, all bets are off. It starts off small, with the realisation that none of the guests have access to a cell signal. Ha ha, everyone at the table jokes, without guessing what’s about to happen (because apparently none of these Gen X/Yers have ever seen a horror film before…) That time, an entire town was convinced that they were “wrong” somehow, that they weren’t where they were supposed to be. Emily seems genuinely worried about it, having read about the Tunguska event of 1908 and the last sighting of this particular comet, Miller’s comet , over Finland back in 1923. See, the night of the dinner party is also the night that a rare comet is passing overhead. Emily is our protagonist it’s through her eyes, mostly, that we see this drama play out, from the moment she arrives at the dinner party with a cracked phone until she wakes up the next morning. There’s an older married couple, New Age Beth and quasi-scientist Hugh (Elizabeth Gracen and Hugo Armstrong) there’s the asshole, Amir (Alex Manugian) and his new girlfriend Laurie (Lauren Maher) and there’s Emily (Emily Baldoni) and her boyfriend Kevin (Maury Sterling), who - it turns out - used to date Laurie in the not-so-distant past. The premise, as I laid out above, is cliche: eight thirty-somethings gather for a dinner party in the home of underworked actor Mike (Nicholas Brendon, of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame) and his Skype executive wife Lee (Lorene Scafaria). I just don’t know where to start with this film. It’s all of them at once, while also being genuinely frightening and startlingly clever and all within a tight hour and a half and with a cast of relative unknowns and with only an improvised script and with a microbudget of $50,000. Hardly original stuff.īut something sets Coherence apart. The 2013 film from writer-director James Ward Byrkit isn’t a standard horror film, nor is it a standard thriller it doesn’t quite fit the mold of sci-fi or fantasy either. It’s what underpins everything from House on Haunted Hill and The Shining to episodes of The X-Files and the murder mystery send-up Clue. As the suspense and tension mounts, decisions are made, lives are upended, and our darkest fears become reality. gather for dinner/games night/vacation/etc and over the course of the night/weekend/winter/etc, some outside force beyond their ken terrorizes them. It’s a classic horror movie trope: a group of friends/family members/co-workers/etc.
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