Coherence (2013)

Directed by: James Ward Byrkit
Country: USA

Movie Review: Psychological sci-fi thriller, “Coherence”, demonstrated good ideas not always fully materialized in practice. Waiting for the passage of a comet, a group of eight friends reunite to have dinner at the house of one of them. What should be a perfect moment to relax from the day-to-day life, ends up into a strange convergence of different realities, aggravated with the semi-chaos created by cracked phones, as well as lack of electricity and Internet. A mysterious box containing photographs of everyone present, taken in that same day and marked with numbers in the back, increases the puzzle. Once outside the house, along dark streets, some of the present found exact 'copies' of themselves. The tension was smartly created, through uncanny conversations, cyclic situations, and scary conclusions that take us to a quirky ‘twilight zone’. I just felt that in its middle part, the development of the story mitigates the thrills, an aspect only extinguished when Em (Emily Baldoni) tries to force her entrance in another reality by committing a murder.  With a hand-held camera always in movement, debutant director/screenwriter, James Ward Byrkit, achieves the effects required without exaggerate. “Coherence” works more as a mysterious game than anything else – dices, markers, pictures, flashlight's colors, numbers, and clashing realities, are part of its reality. It’s far from perfection, but its flaws are passable, perhaps because the cast believed in this curious low-budgeted project that did something non-futile without resorting to gimmicks or fancy special effects.