Coherence

Coherence (2014) takes place at a dinner party for eight friends on a night a comet passes overhead. The power goes out. One house on the street still has its lights on. Two of them go to look and come back with a box; inside are photographs of the people in that house, and the people are everyone at the table. The idea is that the comet multiplies reality. There are countless copies of the same house and the same dinner along that street, and without realising it people start moving between them. At some point nobody can be sure which version they are in. The method of making it is as interesting as the film. There was no script. Byrkit shot it in his own house over five nights. Each morning he sent the actors notes containing only their own character's information: a backstory, one or two things to say that night, a motivation. Nobody knew what anyone else had been given. He did not tell them what was coming, how to react, or how it ended. The result is that the audience's confusion is the actors' confusion. The unease on screen is not acting. The budget was almost nothing. No effects, one house. Virtually all of its eighty nine minutes is improvised. It runs 89 minutes. Good for: science fiction, single location tension, and low budget work. Less good for: the plot is deliberately tangled and may not settle on one viewing.