Want to know what I knew about Coherence going into it? ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOTHING. Okay, that’s not entirely true. I knew it was a movie. I guess I had also read a little blurb about it to know it at least sounded interesting. Expect a lot of shit like this from the festival, guys. Just me saying, “YO I DON’T KNOW WHAT THIS WAS BUT I WATCHED IT.” Ever the consummate professional, Wolfman! Anyways, this movie was more science fiction than straight up horror, but I think that once you read my synopsis, you could see why I’d be interested in checking it out. So how about you do that, huh? Fucking read it, dummy.

I’d like to see a sci-fi movie with alternate Earths featuring Emily Foxler and Britt Marling (and I’m in it, too, as the hero they have to kiss).

On the night that a comet is passing by Earth, a group of friends all decide to have dinner together in the off-chance that if anything strange happens, they can all experience it together. Strange things do start happening, but not really anything that’s cause for alarm. It starts with cell phone screens breaking and the power going out, but while trying to assess what’s really going on, things start getting really strange. There start being knocks on the door and no one there, and when one person goes outside to the only house on the block that has power, he swears that when he looks inside, he sees everyone who was at the dinner party. Wait, what? Two theories start forming amongst the friends, with the more “rational” explanation being that, similar to other astronomical events, the comet is having a strange effect on everyone’s minds and there’s a paranoia-driven group hallucination. The other theory is that the comet has caused these friends to enter into a Schrödinger’s cat type of quantum physics paradox where this group of friends is now co-existing with their doppelgängers and once the comet passes, there will only be one group of friends. Okay, I guess that’s kind of a leap in logic but I guess with all the weird shit going on, it’s plausible. The film then follows these friends trying to figure out who is who, what is what, where and when they exist, and how the fuck to react to the idea that they’ve entered some sort of parallel universe with infinite versions of themselves. Fucking trippy, man.

EVERYONE LOOK SERIOUS, THIS IS IMPORTANT PROBABLY.

It only took about 5 minutes of watching this movie for me to get super, SUPER into the concept. One of my favorite “sci fi” movies of the last few years was Melancholia, so even though this film wasn’t quite as surreal or apocalyptic as that one, I was instantly engaged in the concept of relatively normal events and conversations taking place at the same time as an incredibly strange event. The conversations might not have been all that interesting or dialogue all that snappy, but the weight of the situation these friends were in made me much more tense. Once the stranger events started happening, the film got a little too complicated for its own good. This isn’t to say that I felt dumb watching it, or at least no dumber than I normally feel, but the editing in some sequences made things a little confusing. I don’t think this is too spoilery, but if you’re scared, don’t read this, but there started being confusion with friends not knowing which house they were in and which group of friends they had actually spent the night with? For example, one group of friends had red glowsticks and they found themselves in a house where everyone was exactly the same but with blue glowsticks. Did that make sense? It makes slightly more sense in the movie that all these people are just fucking wandering all over the place and no one knows who they really are or where they really came from. I appreciated the details put into all the complications and doppelgänger shit, but it was pretty difficult to grasp at times. Remember Primer? It was kind of like that, except possibly more confusing. I was willing to tolerate all the things that had kind of confused me, but the end result ended up being a little disappointing after this whole world had been established. Even though the movie got a little too confusing and I might not have felt the conclusion lived up to what the film was trying to establish, there was one character who described their situation as being similar to the movie Sliding Doors and also at one point a character saw his wife and said, “MY WIFE!” like Borat so that’s cool with me.

Wolfman Moon Scale

Official Site
IMDb