Coherence (2013)

This post is part of my ongoing project to watch my science fiction blindspots. You can find my list of upcoming movies for this project here.

I’ve talked about watching hidden gems for this project before. When I watched The Endless, I talked about how I admired its willingness to aim for targets it couldn’t quite hit, and about low-budget science fiction that understands its limitations and finds creative ways to circumvent them. I didn’t know it then, but I was writing about Coherence.

It would be impossible to spoil the plot, but the less I say about it, the better; one of the joys of watching this kind of science fiction is discovering what’s uncanny in its world alongside its characters. Coherence makes its world known with the tools available to it, without abandoning them for flashy theatrics. Instead, the story is told with the tools of any other domestic thriller: awkward dinner party conversations, the ability to recognize the handwriting on a note, ordinary household items, someone entering or exiting a room. The movie works because it knows how to take ordinary actions out of context, and in so doing, making them seem strange or threatening or even otherworldly. And its characters react to their strange new world in a way that feels believable—they are collectively and individually just as smart and just as dumb as any other ordinary people.

I love that this movie, though brief, takes the time to establish everyone in the room in relationship to each other. The script understands that its stakes are personal, and it builds a foundation to match those deeply personal stakes by relying not on scientific explanations or flashy effects, but on the embodied experiences of each individual character, and by throwing them into a room where their respective sharp edges begin to poke at the others around them. I’ve taken part in gatherings and dinner parties that felt just as uncanny as the one in this story, even before the tangle of the plot begins to reveal itself; it’s a credit to Coherence’s script and to the actors that the strangeness feels familiar.