Coherence
Description
Four couples gather for a dinner party. It’s a breezy night like any other for the bougie crew (“I have not had carbs for a week!” sighs one guest), though insecure Em (Emily Baldoni) is royally miffed when her boyfriend’s sultry ex shows up as another’s date, and frustrated actor Mike (Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Nicholas Brendon) is barely keeping his bitterness at bay. But the atmosphere grows astronomically tenser when a seemingly harmless natural event—a comet passing overhead—begins affecting life on Earth in mysterious ways. First, cell phone screens crack. Then, the internet goes down. Then, the power goes out up and down the block, except for one house just visible down the street that has all its lights on. As the group scrambles to react and relationships begin to shift amid the chaos, Coherence takes a turn for the delightfully weird and brain-busting – think The Twilight Zone meets Primer meets Schrödinger’s pesky cat. (To share more would spoil the film’s clever twists and turns.) Though Coherence was largely improvised, with a story treatment guiding its action, the film still managed to pick up screenplay prizes at Austin’s Fantastic Fest and the Sitges Film Festival, a testament to Byrkit’s skill in crafting a high-concept film with on-the-fly dialogue, and to his actors’ ability to roll with the time-and-space punches. –Cheryl Eddy
James Ward Byrkit—whose previous credits include co-writing the Oscar-winning animated film Rango and working in the art department on multiple Pirates of the Caribbean movies—makes his feature debut with Coherence, which he filmed with a skeleton crew over five days in his own house. He has said that his next film will be about time travel.
Film Details
Language English
Year 2013
Runtime 89
Country USA
Director James Byrkit
Producer Lene Bausager
Writer James Byrkit
Editor Lance Pereira
Cinematographer Nic Sadler
Music Kristin Øhrn Dyrud
Cast Nicholas Brendon, Emily Baldoni, Hugo Armstrong, Elizabeth Gracen
Print Source Oscilloscope Laboratories/ kate@oscilloscope.net/ www.oscilloscope.net