#355: Coherence

Release Date: June 20th, 2014

Format: Streaming (Tubi)

Written by: James Ward Byrkit

Directed by: James Ward Byrkit

4 Star

An ingenious low-budget thriller, or rather no-budget, Coherence is a testament to the power of good storytelling. Writer/director James Ward Byrkit, utilizing what looks like a Canon Mark III camera (Coherence looks exactly like the cheap student films I helped make years ago) and his own house as the only set, has made a masterpiece that is simplistic in its execution but hauntingly deep in its themes.

The story is about a group of middle-aged friends gathered together for a dinner party on the night Miller’s Comet is passing over Earth. Strange things begin to happen: a few of the friends’ cell phones crack; the power goes out; a drinking glass is found broken, but nobody remembers how. When two of the friends venture out into the powerless, pitch-black neighborhood towards a single lit house in the distance, one of them returns bloodied around his right eye. The other friend is carrying a metal box. Inside it is a ping pong paddle - strange- but even stranger are photos of each of them that they have no memory of posing for. 

What is going on?

The two friends seem confused concerning the details of the house in the distance. They say they looked through a window and saw a table set for a dinner party, and it looked just like the house they’re in now. Maybe they just got turned around in the dark and did a circle? But where did the box come from? And those photos?

Are they in some fractured reality? Has the overhead comet created a “quantum decoherence,” where two seemingly separate states are actually co-existing at the same time? As the friends venture in and out of the house to look for help (and meaning), it seems undeniable that there is an alternate version of each of them out there. Or possibly more. As Byrkit’s wonderful concept unfolds, with his well-cast improv acting ensemble given only parts of the script in order to elicit more authentic reactions, these close friends find out that nobody who ventures out into the dark returns exactly the same.

You can’t go home again. 

Much has been written about Byrkit’s wonderful less-is-more approach in regards to his film’s production, but I was equally impressed with the themes he explores in his writing. Coherence darkly probes the facades we all create to give our lives meaning: we curate public personas (even amongst our closest friends), we hide our true feelings, and we selfishly horde a version of reality that we think we deserve. We tell ourselves that what we see and feel and know is real, and that we deserve a full and rewarding life.

So we avoid the dark, and we tell ourselves things that aren’t exactly true.