When Worlds Collide
Coherence / directed by James Ward Byrkit
Like a non-mystical, less apocalyptic variation on Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, Coherence summons a celestial object to threaten transformation, doom, and, quite possibly, slow-motion sequences. In this case, the object in question is an icy comet hurtling through the night sky of a middle-class Silicon Valley neighborhood, above the roof of a dinner party soon to be knocked off its axis (and ass) by certain mysterious effects of this extraterrestrial visitor.
Our dinner guests, four couples, are amiable enough, though none too remarkable. We understand it is a bit of a reunion for some of them; one gentleman has showed up with the ex-girlfriend of another guest. A vague sense of melancholy and disappointment laps at the edges of the gathering. Em (Emily Baldoni), a dancer who is not quite a protagonist but closer to that role than any of the others, has recently lost the dance opportunity of a lifetime; the host, Mike (Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Nicholas Brendon), was a major actor in a successful television series (Roswell, amusingly (and self-consciously) enough), but his career has subsequently hit the skids.
After a few preludes to what is to come - a broken iPhone screen here, a mysteriously shattered wine glass there, the disruption of phone and internet service, a physicist-brother’s amusingly ominous vague warning that “strange things” might happen because of the comet - the lights dramatically go out, and a peculiar sort of hell slowly begins to break loose. A sortie to a nearby house - the only one in the neighborhood with its lights still on -- results in a disturbing report grudgingly dragged out of the returning scouts: it turns out that a few of these very same dinner party guests could be seen through the windows of the other home! Oh, and also, they’ve returned with a mysterious metal box that contains photos of them all, including one that seems technically impossible from earlier that evening, with numbers written on the back suggestive of, variously, the methodology of a serial killer, cabalistic intent, and pure randomness.
As they grapple with a gathering shitstorm of conundrums and physical impossibilities made manifest, it becomes clear that some of the more outlandish possibilities associated with the comet’s passage have come to pass. Reality, it seems, has not only begun splitting into parallel universes, but these universes have begun to interact in unpredictable ways. All the hoity-toity theoretical physics talk is something of red herring, an element of black comedy, even, because what really starts to warp reality is their individual and collective response to their plight. Very quickly, you see, they begin to view their parallel selves as possible threats to their ability to retain a link to their original reality - to maintain coherence, to take a hint from the film’s title - and so they start to concoct ways to outwit their parallel lives, who, of course, are clearly doing the same thing.
But the contagion of one reality with the next is impossible to stop, it turns out, and the pressure cooker of it all inexorably unravels relationships, friendships, marriages. The whole situation acts like a karmic supercollider, bad intentions ramifying in increasingly unsettling ways (a point reinforced by the fact that these eight find themselves isolated as a group in whatever universe they happen to be). A moral corollary to all the theoretical physics quickly becomes apparent: side effects of the comet may include paranoia, narcissism, betrayal of loved ones, and possibly murder. That our milquetoast guests so quickly begin to ascribe darker motives to their parallel selves - at one point, one such band is amusingly and unnervingly shown darkly across the street distinguished only by the different color of its glowsticks - is the black core of this small-scale puzzler. Of course, in some ways, it’s an impossibly extreme situation in which they’ve been placed - who’s to say how we ourselves would react if our double arrived on the scene? I would add, too, that elements in Coherence suggest that there is nothing fated about how they respond to their situation: if anything, there’s a disturbing sense in which all fates appear possible, depending on each throw of the electrons.
Coherence does a nice job of establishing a genre-bending scenario without overplaying its hand. It takes a sort of basic indie-style friendship/relationship flick as its reference point, with its sci-fi premise really setting this li’l whirligig a-humming; there are also hints of horror and the aforementioned black comedy. What I mean to say is that it concocts something that feels fairly fresh if not mind-blowing: it manages to pull us willingly into a fantastic scenario, with its eye ever on the true prize of questions of character and fate.