#Coherence movie movie#
#Coherence movie full#

#Coherence movie movie#

The movie itself is certainly worth seeing, if only to bask in the exercise of it.Īs for that exercise: it is, of course, all about multiple universes. So if you've never seen it, I want you to know that all of the terrible things I've said so far are actually kind of beside the point. Presenting itself, initially, as the non-adventures of eight rather tepid human beings is exactly how Coherence goes about pulling the rug out from underneath the viewer - and the characters, I suppose.Īt some point, anybody wanting to talk about Coherence is going to have to go ahead and say what Coherence is, which disappoints me - I managed to walk in completely blind (I didn't even know what genre it was), and I think that's easily the best way to experience getting blindsided. The acting, however, turns out to be a secret strength, since the story ends up being entirely driven by how a completely banal event is shattered through the subtlest, almost indiscernible shifts.

The aesthetic, at least, never changes, and never stopped pulling me out of the movie. It's the same 'we shall embrace our shitty artlessness as a point of pride' thing that digital microbudget filmmakers have played at since the dawn of the form, and if that's your thing, you are a vastly more forgiving filmgoer than I could imagine being. Deliberately sloppy handheld cameras, zooming and reframing in the middle of shots arrhythmic shot lengths in the raggedy cutting the whole nine yards, except that Coherence, thank God, sounds perfectly fine. They're just not very interesting people, and they think not very interesting thoughts, ant they say not very interesting things, though at least they say it with a fair degree of articulate flair.Ĭompounding matters, Byrkit's aesthetic is quite without any personality or marks of distinction.

#Coherence movie full#

a room full of actors - and they're going to come up with a room of addle-headed, out-of-touch Angelinos. That is to say, gather a bunch of somewhat addle-headed, out-of-touch Angelinos - e.g. But the limitations of the form are more or less the same: characters who feel helplessly penned-in by the lived experience of the people playing him. There are definitely worse films made on this improv-with-notes model the cast at least has the benefit of being comfortable and natural on-camera, which is leagues beyond all those damn movies where New York-based directors hire other New York-based directors to 'act'. The results are whatever the hell they are. So it was that he came up with a plot outline, gave each of his eight characters a secret or two, and invited the cast to improvise their way through some slightly awkward pre-dinner conversation tinged with all those secrets. and who hit a point where he wanted to do something smaller, more actor-driven, less commercial. The film was the brainchild of James Ward Byrkit, whose career has been spent mostly in the orbit of Gore Verbinski - storyboard artist on the Pirates of the Caribbeans, writer on Rango, etc. For the first little while, we just get to learn who these people are (the first time through, it seems like the introductions last about 30 minutes, but in fact the seeds of the plot are being planted and watered by the 15-minute mark), and this is the part of Coherence to which I most strenuously object.

Keeping the eight straight requires a bit of an effort, but here's the breakdown in terms of couples: Mike (Nicholas Brendon, why by virtue of his years with Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the biggest name by a considerable margin) and Lee (Lorene Scafaria, who has since established herself as a writer-director) are the hosts, and their guests are Emily (Emily Foxler) and Kevin (Maury Sterling), Beth (Elizabeth Gracen) and Hugh (Hugo Armstrong), and Amir (Alex Manugian) and Laurie (Lauren Maher), the last of whom is Kevin's ex.

So here are the ingredients: eight people gather for a dinner party in suburban Los Angeles, on the night of an exceptionally weird comet passing overhead ('weird' at first means 'makes people's cell phone screens spontaneously crack', but that's just the warm-up). But getting to that point takes an awful lot of patience, at least if you share my bias against the standard mode of American indie production since around the middle of the 2000s. The microbudget 2013 feature Coherence ends up being rather a rather snazzy mindfuck once the story gets going, and the story gets going fairly early on (the movie is but 89 minutes long, and thus has limited time to screw around). Lord save me from indie films with handheld cameras. A review requested by Daniel S, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.