Coherence: When The Sky Lights up, Who Are You

Director: James Ward Byrkit Writers: James Ward Byrkit, Alex Manugian Cast: Emily Baldoni, Maury Sterling, Nicholas Brendon

In Coherence, eight friends gather for a night of festivities, the night a comet passes overhead, a classic movie trope: the dinner party, and what always begins with a night of wine, awkward laughter and sharing stories from the past usually ends with worlds twisted: in the case of Coherence, in absolution. A disquieted bend in reality, unfolding its own story as the comet lights up the sky.

This film is a remarkable addition to the genre of cosmic horror: the scare is scarce, it’s liminal, the dark place on the street they walk down. It’s the quiet knowledge that truly horrifies us: ourselves. It’s uncomfortably realistic; we are watching a group of friends who don’t seem unusual from any group of friends. Mild tension, intermingled romance, and stories they share in laughter that date back decades, and they achieved this by giving the actors conversational prompts that lead to viable dialogue that transcended simply just writing. We see genuine reactions because the discourse is authentic, the conversations overlap, the laughs are startled and real, voices are raised in humour and anger, and for moments, it feels more like we are a quiet guest at the dinner party watching the night unfold rather than a viewer watching a film. The setting works with this as well: a familiar suburban home and basic middle-class friends, there’s nothing extraordinary in this setting except the comet that’s passing above the house, which anchors the viewers.

Everything in this film feels normal, except for the cosmic event that’s happening. The camera isn’t cinematic; it’s reactive. There is no standard movie glow; the lighting is the lamps, the candles, the phone screens, and the streetlights. We’re in the real world, with real-world logic—it’s the wine that’s causing the confusion, it’s stress, it’s just a power outage. They have to be confronted with literal versions of themselves before they accept they need to entertain the outlandish, the implication that something beyond their control is happening. It’s simple. It’s genius. It’s engaging to the audience as it sucks us.

The title of the film refers to quantum coherence—the phenomenon where particles exist in multiple states until observed. The comet is the catalyst for decoherence; the darkness is the warp zone, and as they wander through the streets, they spin through different realities like a roulette wheel, unable to determine where they will end up. This happens when the dinner party breaks up, except we don’t realize the same group of people never come back together until it’s too late. They discover a box full of photographs, each marked with a number, the number determined by the roll of a die. They are inspired to do the same thing, with an object to separate reality. A ping pong paddle, in the ‘friend’ group we are watching,  a coaster.

Coherence is full of doppelgängers, but they’re not inherently evil. They’re us, different versions who have made macro different choices in their lives, resulting in slightly different variations of who they are. It is Em’ who realizes this, and while the friends are screaming at each other, she slips through the door into the distortion in order to find a better version of her life, she wanders through more confusion, friends tied up, and alcoholism until she finds a picture-perfect version of her life and does something desperate, human. Understandable, but morally wrong. She chooses this life. She attempts to replace herself by taking the life of her counterpart.

But it doesn’t work.

The final phone call, her mirror self still present, her partner receiving a phone call from the woman standing right in front of him.

Coherence had a small budget, $50, 000 and it didn’t need more than that to unsettle us. It works because we understand the horror behind it, and this horror is internal; it’s not knowing what we would or could do in desperation to seek out a better life if we were given the opportunity. It splinters reality. It lingers in your brain, a cosmic horror told across a dinner party.