Once more we find ourselves at a dinner party whose guests find themselves hard pressed to escape, thanks largely to complications provided by an invasive celestial body and a series of … well, to say more would spoil the modest fun. There are playful early hints of what’s to come: Em shares a story about her past experience as a dancer that leads to a pointed conversation about parallel lives and stolen destinies Mike, it turns out, once starred on the sci-fi series “Roswell.” And in short order, accompanied by the foreboding shudder of Kristin Ohrn Dyrud’s minimalist score, the comet makes its big entrance, shutting down everyone’s cell phones and causing a massive power outage - a minor inconvenience compared with the Moebius-strip craziness of what happens next.Īlthough Byrkit confines his actors and his largely unscripted story to the house, “Coherence” soon reveals its true setting to be some nocturnal twilight zone located at the juncture of Luis Bunuel’s “The Exterminating Angel,” Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia” and Shane Carruth’s “Primer,” all superior exercises in cine-surrealism. Byrkit sets the scene and the table nicely enough, establishing a warm candlelit atmosphere of friendly chit-chat and vaguely discernible tension, even if his storytelling choices - overlapping dialogue, banal digressions, excessively wobbly camerawork, extreme closeups and jagged editing - at times strain too hard for authenticity.īut then, perhaps the fragmented indie roughness of it all - particularly the way editor Lance Pereira ends nearly every scene with an abrupt cut to black - is meant to signify a deeper rift in the film’s universe. Arriving one fateful evening at the cozy suburban home of acerbic actor Mike (Nicholas Brendon) and his affable wife, Lee (Lorene Scafaria), pretty Em (Emily Foxler) is the closest figure to a protagonist in a group that also includes her boyfriend, Kevin (Maury Sterling) older married couple Hugh (Hugo Armstrong) and Beth (Elizabeth Gracen) and the annoying Amir (Alex Manugian), who has thoughtlessly brought along one of Kevin’s exes, Laurie (Lauren Maher), as his date.
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