Coherence – That One Film I Can’t Shut Up About

Every once a while, you come across a movie that feels like it was made in someone's backyard, with their friends, but somehow messes up your head and leaves a mark deeper than anything that a $200 million studio film could usher. Coherence is that film for me. Not the most polished, not the most groundbreaking on paper, but it got under my skin and never really left. It's one of my all-time personal favorites, the type of movie I recommend to people of any particular taste.

Just to give you some interesting context and set up the unique background story - this film was shot over five nights by a mostly amateur cast & crew, with a mere budget of around $50k, and the best/wildest part? The film is almost entirely: IMPROVISED! Let me explain.

The director and writers had a loose structure panned out for the film. They played along with the cast to steer the direction. The film did not have any industry standard script or formatted screenplay, rather the cast were made aware of certain set pieces and notion, the rest was organically acted out by them. Reportedly, 100% of the dialogues, and almost the entire non-dialogue action sequences were improvised.

When asked about how they managed to complete a feature length film without fundamental conventionalities of film-making, and how much were the actors in the dark, director James Ward Byrkit replied:

They were completely in the dark. All the surprises you see are real. They didn’t know the power was going out. They didn’t know the knocks were coming. There were knocks that surprised me, even, because it was, like, [... minor spoiler redacted]. It was uncontrolled mayhem. You’re improvising along with the actors as a director, and cameraman. My DP, Nic Sadler, and I told them, “You can go anywhere you want in the house and we’ll follow you. We’re not going to rehearse it or block it.” We just treated it almost like a documentary unfolding in front of us.

Now, the entire focal point of the 'good bits' of the film isn't tied to how it was made, rather the brilliance and dazzling mysteries of the end product. So let's dive in.

It starts like a casual hangout. Eight friends sitting around a dinner table, catching up, trading half-baked stories about some comet that’s supposed to pass close to Earth that night. Everyone’s a little smug, a little brittle, a little too aware of who else is in the room — exes, old friends, new tension, all simmering under the surface. Then the power cuts out. Phones stop working. A house a few blocks down still has lights on, and from there, things spiral in a way that’s impossible to predict but totally irresistible once it starts.

The magic trick here is that everything feels natural until it doesn't. It's shot handheld, shaky natural documentary styled camera movement, captures the event that almost feels like an accident, and the dialogue, as mentioned were mostly improvised, feels like real people trying to make sense of something they’re not equipped to handle. There’s no exposition dump. No clear villain. Just a slow-burning realization that reality might not be holding together the way it's supposed to.

Director Byrkit [or shall I say the cast along with Byrkit] doesn't rely on visual effects or flashy tricks. They collectively lead to paranoia, uncertainty, and reiteration. The same, innocuous at first, dinner party bleeds into itself, with a repetition not fully disorienting but has some elements of cadence, along with increasingly messed-up versions of the same people showing up.

As we witness systematic chaos and sudden altercations, the film doesn't leave us helpless. The characters, without much conviction, utter quantum mechanics or try to sound smart. This ploy feels very self-aware, natural, and the characters dabbles around ideas like Schrödinger’s cat, or multiverse theories, but only in the way, we, real people would, the notions and expressions are half-remembered, with reference to pop culture or something someone once read online. You just never lose that "realism" connection.

It’s easy to compare it to Primer or The Twilight Zone, and sure, those are in the DNA. But where Primer is a cold math puzzle, Coherence feels messy, sweaty, personal. The real tension isn't from parallel dimensions or time loops, it stems from spectating people unravel in all sorts of predicaments in real time. Watching them realize that maybe there’s a better version of their life just a few feet away, and wondering what they'd do to grab it.

Emily Foxler, in particular, carries a lot of this. Her character, Em, starts off feeling like the quiet one in the room, but as the story folds in on itself, she becomes the emotional core. Her decisions in the final stretch are desperate, messy, and make total sense, not logically, but in a deeply human one.

No one, not even the one who'd fill this film with absolute adulation, would try to pretend or convey the notion that it’s perfect. The low budget aspects are visible. The visuals, at times, are functional at best. Sometimes the sound feels a bit disheveled. And yet, I wouldn’t change a thing. It’s one of those 'once in a blue moon' films where the imperfections and foibles are the charm. It urges you to pay attention, but doesn’t punish you for not solving it [you won't miss much if you watch it casually, but it'd only be rewarding if you do the otherwise]. And honestly, I still don’t know if I’ve fully worked it out. That’s part of why I love it. Every time I rewatch it, I discover some new subtleties.

Although Coherence doesn't reach the apex heights some of the other films of that genre have, or even in its own regards, it has some greater potentials. But for me? It’s essential. There are bigger, smarter, scarier sci-fi movies. But Coherence is often times the one I keep thinking about. The one I come back to. The one that feels like it knows something about how terrifying it is to be uncertain, not about time or space, but about yourself.