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Coherence
Oscilloscope Laboratories // Unrated // January 20, 2015
List Price: $34.99 [Buy now and save at Amazon]
The Film:
Coherence proves to be an interesting title for writer James Ward Byrkit's Twilight Zone-esque indie project, since an intentional lack of coherence ends up being one of the film's most intriguing attributes. What starts out as a relatively simple dinner party interrupted by cosmic events ends up being a crazy trip down the rabbit hole: the result of pulling together a collection of actors over a brief shooting schedule, giving them vague directions of where to take ad-libbed conversations, and letting the unfiltered chaos ensue during an astrological event. Based on aspiration and eerie atmosphere alone, it's an enthralling puzzle box with a bevy of intricate twists and turns in the enigmatic space between science-fiction and fantasy. Beyond the surface, however, lies a maddening airburst of rigged plot apparatus and unlikely interactions amid a dangerous anomaly from outer space, hinged on theoretical gimmickry that'll look familiar to sci-fi lovers, arthouse cinema enthusiasts ... even fans of the show Community.
On the eve when a comet is set to come abnormally close to the Earth's atmosphere, a group of eight relatively close friends drop by a Santa Monica home for a planned get-together. While their initial convos take enough time to sketch out each of the characters and their histories -- the washed-up actor (Nicholas Brendon) and his Skype-creating wife (Seeking a Friend for the End of the World director Lorene Scafaria); the transcendent health nut (Elizabeth Gracen) and her bearded husband with an astronomy-focused brother; the guy who brought someone else's ex-girlfriend to the party -- Coherence finds its point-of-view largely
centered on Em (Emily Baldoni), a down-on-her-luck dancer going through a rough patch with her boyfriend, Kevin (Maury Sterling). Over their meal, their discussion ebbs and flows from stifled catch-up banter to mysterious talk about the comet as a diversion, with Em's "expertise" on the matter spinning stories of the weird stuff that's happened in previous comet flybys. Lo and behold, starting with broken phones and lights going out, the evening begin to reveal its own bizarre turns of events when the group spots one lone lit house at the end of the otherwise pitch-black neighborhood.
Diretor Byrkit, whose creative eccentricity can be found under the hood of Gore Verbinski's Rango and Pirates of the Caribbean, intentionally shunned the confines of big-budget productions as much as he could with Coherence. Instead of following a blow-by-blow script, he gave his actors loose notes throughout the shooting process that pinpointed where their conversations and dramatic developments would eventually end up, allowing them to organically engage each other so as to create the illusion of a casual, developing party gone wrong. While this works for shaping well-defined, often repellent characters that naturally come from their respective actors -- a provocative home-wrecker, an unpredictable drunk, a dejected girlfriend preoccupied with celestial oddities -- the chemistry between them all doesn't convince enough as a gathering of friends, nor as an arrangement of couples. This makes for individuals that work well enough as chess pieces moving along a grand stratagem, but the resulting distrust and lovers' squabbles only work as observable cogs in Byrkit's mystery machine instead of authentic dramatic beats.
Therefore, there's a certain element of mystery at the core of Coherence's maneuverings that's worth preserving for the sake of the characters, but it's safe to say that the comet's impact on Earth goes beyond interrupting power supplies and means of communication, tossing together both physics and metaphysics into a chillingly unfathomable scenario. James Ward Byrkit deserves credit for concocting an elaborate exercise that makes the audience scrutinize details of the dinner party with each bend and break of their perceived reality, forcing the characters to both literally and figuratively wander in complete darkness for answers about what's happening. Unfortunately, the way things do happen are frequently, and frustratingly, manufactured for the sake of complexity: how often they emphasize objects in their surroundings, how hastily they jump into drama-causing situations, how frequently they feel the need to leave the house under these circumstances. The script intentionally creates a lot of variables to track hinged on reckless decision-making, and most of them lack the organic flow of the ad-libbed conversations generated by Byrkit's hands-off scripting desires.
Some unavoidable, light spoilers follow when you get any deeper into a discussion about Coherence, which delves into the messy world of alternate realities, duality, and the repercussions of circumstance through the many-worlds branch of quantum theory. At first, writer/director Byrkit appears as if he's got a simplistic grasp on the divergence of reality through the decisions people make, going either this way or that way; however, the writing gradually reveals that it's merely Em and the people around her with that limited perception at first, turning the film into a chaotic mess of possibilities based on any number of variables introduced throughout their evening. Thing is, a lot of what happens
overtly feeds the gimmick instead of playing out like natural conditions of a dinner sent reeling by other-worldly interruptions, where everything's randomized and dramatized just enough to keep the gears moving, traversing time and space at convenient moments and with self-fulfilling restraint so it doesn't prematurely upset the balance. By the end, Byrkit's broadened the scope of the comet's effects so far that the transpiring events can't be taken in earnest, even while subtly reassuring that, yes, worse happens elsewhere. End spoilers.
Coherence has a plan for its endgame, though, an elaborate maze of variables and dramatic tension underneath the comet's spell, navigated by a deep and intuitive performance from Emily Baldoni. In a scenario where the laws of the universe are put on hold, director Byrkit uses this science-fiction base to depict what choices certain people might make and what lines they'd cross to better their circumstances or simply ensure their self-preservation, savoring the eerie insecurity of not being able to predict what we, ourselves, might be capable of under anarchistic conditions. He generates a capable amount of suspense and unknowable atmosphere out of what's essentially a one-room setup shot out of his home, bleeding together several influences -- some admitted and others not -- to form the cosmic turmoil unleashed on Em and her friends amid their haunted observations and puzzle solving. Despite familiar dice-rolls, advantageous paradoxes, and shifting personas over a dinner party, it ultimately arrives a novel mind-boggling resolution that's content to wander in the void of uncertainty for the sake of its own thought experiment, reaching for a mix of eeriness and philosophy in the vein of Rod Serling's work and nearly grasping it.
The DVD:
Video and Audio:
Despite being shot on an almost nonexistent budget within one setting, Coherence does employ a respectable-grade digital camera and smart lighting for its intentional organically-moving cinematography, often shadowy and dominated by candlelight-caliber yellows, cremes, and oranges. Oscilloscope Laboratories present the 2.39:1-framed film in a dutiful widescreen-enhanced transfer that grasps as much detail as possible from the zooms and tight close-ups, from stands of hair and beards to the subtle shine of metal and glass underneath the light. There are expected limitations, though, such as oppressive black levels and aggressive noise especially during darker sequences with the characters walking outside. With that in mind, the appearance of skin tones, wood shades, and random blasts of color -- namely the glow sticks -- appear to be in-line with what Byrkit intended, aside from a little moire shimmering in curtains. Visual complexity wasn't on the top of their agenda, but the subtle flourishes of detail concentration and persistent zooming look appropriate in this HD-derived transfer.
Oscilloscope offers two choices in the audio department -- 5.1 Dolby Digital and 2-channel stereo options -- both of which have their strengths and weaknesses. The full surround package obviously handles surround elements more robustly, coming in handy when people come banging on doors and when there's activity happening at separate areas of the room, but the dialogue tends to be a tad too thin and constrained to the center speaker, with a few occasions of mumbling dialogue. Conversely, the stereo track loses the added separation to the rear channels, but its dialogue robustness and limited separation moments at the front are satisfying in their own right. Either way, Coherence's dialogue never gets entirely lost in the shuffle, and the eerie musical interjections are satisfying aware of mid-range and bass channels. English subs are available.
Special Features:
Audio Commentary with James Ward Byrkit, writer/actor Alex Manugian, and Emily Foxler (Beldoni):
Prominent among the extras provided is a commentary with the director and his central collaborators, where they touch on the origins of the project and anecdotes about the shooting process. Early on, Byrkit and Manugian reveal the complexity of their project, suggesting that every little thing on-screen fits into a pattern that they decide not to expand upon in the track, while also digging into details about the dinner being prepared and the building suspense generated by the vague directions given to the actors. The content shifts back and forth between insight and congratulation, especially towards Emily and her responsiveness to the role, and it defaults to plot reiteration at times. It's kind of a dull track altogether, but you can glean some insightful bits from it with a little patience.
Oscilloscope Laboratories have also included a Behind the Scenes of Coherence (16:35, 16x9) exploration of the film that gets a few more of the actors and filmmakers involved in the discussion, but the material discussed generally retraces much of the same content already covered in the audio commentary (which, given its shorter runtime and visual representation, might be preferred). The difference, of course, comes in behind-the-scenes shots of the filming process, paired with face-to-face interviews with director Byrkit, actress Emily Beldoni, and the others. They've also included director Byrkit's original Test Footage (3:52, 16x9) for the dinner sequence and several of the actors involved, as well as a Theatrical Trailer (1:52, 16x9).
Final Thoughts:
Coherence accomplishes a lot on a very small budget, crafting a convincingly foreboding and mysterious cosmic anomaly around little more than a dinner party. James Ward Byrkit and Alex Manugian use their micro-budget limitations as an opportunity to try intriguing things with labyrinthine scripting, subversion of tropes, and free-form acting that emerges from vague objectives given to the performers before each shoot. What results is an intricately-constructed, detail-oriented enigma that largely succeeds in guiding the viewers' minds in desired directions; that said, its ambitiousness and intentional hands-off experimentation has its downfalls, where triggers in the plot are too on-the-nose observable in relation to the storytelling and the building dramatic energy works only as representations of realized individual characters instead of a cohesive unit of friends. Mildly Recommended, but I prefer other subtle science-fiction enigmas like The One I Love and Another Earth, whose dramatic throughlines compliment the strength of their reality-warping plotting.
Thomas Spurlin, Staff Reviewer -- DVDTalk Reviews | Personal Blog/Site
Coherence proves to be an interesting title for writer James Ward Byrkit's Twilight Zone-esque indie project, since an intentional lack of coherence ends up being one of the film's most intriguing attributes. What starts out as a relatively simple dinner party interrupted by cosmic events ends up being a crazy trip down the rabbit hole: the result of pulling together a collection of actors over a brief shooting schedule, giving them vague directions of where to take ad-libbed conversations, and letting the unfiltered chaos ensue during an astrological event. Based on aspiration and eerie atmosphere alone, it's an enthralling puzzle box with a bevy of intricate twists and turns in the enigmatic space between science-fiction and fantasy. Beyond the surface, however, lies a maddening airburst of rigged plot apparatus and unlikely interactions amid a dangerous anomaly from outer space, hinged on theoretical gimmickry that'll look familiar to sci-fi lovers, arthouse cinema enthusiasts ... even fans of the show Community.
On the eve when a comet is set to come abnormally close to the Earth's atmosphere, a group of eight relatively close friends drop by a Santa Monica home for a planned get-together. While their initial convos take enough time to sketch out each of the characters and their histories -- the washed-up actor (Nicholas Brendon) and his Skype-creating wife (Seeking a Friend for the End of the World director Lorene Scafaria); the transcendent health nut (Elizabeth Gracen) and her bearded husband with an astronomy-focused brother; the guy who brought someone else's ex-girlfriend to the party -- Coherence finds its point-of-view largely
centered on Em (Emily Baldoni), a down-on-her-luck dancer going through a rough patch with her boyfriend, Kevin (Maury Sterling). Over their meal, their discussion ebbs and flows from stifled catch-up banter to mysterious talk about the comet as a diversion, with Em's "expertise" on the matter spinning stories of the weird stuff that's happened in previous comet flybys. Lo and behold, starting with broken phones and lights going out, the evening begin to reveal its own bizarre turns of events when the group spots one lone lit house at the end of the otherwise pitch-black neighborhood. Diretor Byrkit, whose creative eccentricity can be found under the hood of Gore Verbinski's Rango and Pirates of the Caribbean, intentionally shunned the confines of big-budget productions as much as he could with Coherence. Instead of following a blow-by-blow script, he gave his actors loose notes throughout the shooting process that pinpointed where their conversations and dramatic developments would eventually end up, allowing them to organically engage each other so as to create the illusion of a casual, developing party gone wrong. While this works for shaping well-defined, often repellent characters that naturally come from their respective actors -- a provocative home-wrecker, an unpredictable drunk, a dejected girlfriend preoccupied with celestial oddities -- the chemistry between them all doesn't convince enough as a gathering of friends, nor as an arrangement of couples. This makes for individuals that work well enough as chess pieces moving along a grand stratagem, but the resulting distrust and lovers' squabbles only work as observable cogs in Byrkit's mystery machine instead of authentic dramatic beats.
Therefore, there's a certain element of mystery at the core of Coherence's maneuverings that's worth preserving for the sake of the characters, but it's safe to say that the comet's impact on Earth goes beyond interrupting power supplies and means of communication, tossing together both physics and metaphysics into a chillingly unfathomable scenario. James Ward Byrkit deserves credit for concocting an elaborate exercise that makes the audience scrutinize details of the dinner party with each bend and break of their perceived reality, forcing the characters to both literally and figuratively wander in complete darkness for answers about what's happening. Unfortunately, the way things do happen are frequently, and frustratingly, manufactured for the sake of complexity: how often they emphasize objects in their surroundings, how hastily they jump into drama-causing situations, how frequently they feel the need to leave the house under these circumstances. The script intentionally creates a lot of variables to track hinged on reckless decision-making, and most of them lack the organic flow of the ad-libbed conversations generated by Byrkit's hands-off scripting desires.
Some unavoidable, light spoilers follow when you get any deeper into a discussion about Coherence, which delves into the messy world of alternate realities, duality, and the repercussions of circumstance through the many-worlds branch of quantum theory. At first, writer/director Byrkit appears as if he's got a simplistic grasp on the divergence of reality through the decisions people make, going either this way or that way; however, the writing gradually reveals that it's merely Em and the people around her with that limited perception at first, turning the film into a chaotic mess of possibilities based on any number of variables introduced throughout their evening. Thing is, a lot of what happens
overtly feeds the gimmick instead of playing out like natural conditions of a dinner sent reeling by other-worldly interruptions, where everything's randomized and dramatized just enough to keep the gears moving, traversing time and space at convenient moments and with self-fulfilling restraint so it doesn't prematurely upset the balance. By the end, Byrkit's broadened the scope of the comet's effects so far that the transpiring events can't be taken in earnest, even while subtly reassuring that, yes, worse happens elsewhere. End spoilers. Coherence has a plan for its endgame, though, an elaborate maze of variables and dramatic tension underneath the comet's spell, navigated by a deep and intuitive performance from Emily Baldoni. In a scenario where the laws of the universe are put on hold, director Byrkit uses this science-fiction base to depict what choices certain people might make and what lines they'd cross to better their circumstances or simply ensure their self-preservation, savoring the eerie insecurity of not being able to predict what we, ourselves, might be capable of under anarchistic conditions. He generates a capable amount of suspense and unknowable atmosphere out of what's essentially a one-room setup shot out of his home, bleeding together several influences -- some admitted and others not -- to form the cosmic turmoil unleashed on Em and her friends amid their haunted observations and puzzle solving. Despite familiar dice-rolls, advantageous paradoxes, and shifting personas over a dinner party, it ultimately arrives a novel mind-boggling resolution that's content to wander in the void of uncertainty for the sake of its own thought experiment, reaching for a mix of eeriness and philosophy in the vein of Rod Serling's work and nearly grasping it.
The DVD:
 |  |
Video and Audio:
Despite being shot on an almost nonexistent budget within one setting, Coherence does employ a respectable-grade digital camera and smart lighting for its intentional organically-moving cinematography, often shadowy and dominated by candlelight-caliber yellows, cremes, and oranges. Oscilloscope Laboratories present the 2.39:1-framed film in a dutiful widescreen-enhanced transfer that grasps as much detail as possible from the zooms and tight close-ups, from stands of hair and beards to the subtle shine of metal and glass underneath the light. There are expected limitations, though, such as oppressive black levels and aggressive noise especially during darker sequences with the characters walking outside. With that in mind, the appearance of skin tones, wood shades, and random blasts of color -- namely the glow sticks -- appear to be in-line with what Byrkit intended, aside from a little moire shimmering in curtains. Visual complexity wasn't on the top of their agenda, but the subtle flourishes of detail concentration and persistent zooming look appropriate in this HD-derived transfer.
Oscilloscope offers two choices in the audio department -- 5.1 Dolby Digital and 2-channel stereo options -- both of which have their strengths and weaknesses. The full surround package obviously handles surround elements more robustly, coming in handy when people come banging on doors and when there's activity happening at separate areas of the room, but the dialogue tends to be a tad too thin and constrained to the center speaker, with a few occasions of mumbling dialogue. Conversely, the stereo track loses the added separation to the rear channels, but its dialogue robustness and limited separation moments at the front are satisfying in their own right. Either way, Coherence's dialogue never gets entirely lost in the shuffle, and the eerie musical interjections are satisfying aware of mid-range and bass channels. English subs are available.
Special Features:
Audio Commentary with James Ward Byrkit, writer/actor Alex Manugian, and Emily Foxler (Beldoni):
Prominent among the extras provided is a commentary with the director and his central collaborators, where they touch on the origins of the project and anecdotes about the shooting process. Early on, Byrkit and Manugian reveal the complexity of their project, suggesting that every little thing on-screen fits into a pattern that they decide not to expand upon in the track, while also digging into details about the dinner being prepared and the building suspense generated by the vague directions given to the actors. The content shifts back and forth between insight and congratulation, especially towards Emily and her responsiveness to the role, and it defaults to plot reiteration at times. It's kind of a dull track altogether, but you can glean some insightful bits from it with a little patience.
Oscilloscope Laboratories have also included a Behind the Scenes of Coherence (16:35, 16x9) exploration of the film that gets a few more of the actors and filmmakers involved in the discussion, but the material discussed generally retraces much of the same content already covered in the audio commentary (which, given its shorter runtime and visual representation, might be preferred). The difference, of course, comes in behind-the-scenes shots of the filming process, paired with face-to-face interviews with director Byrkit, actress Emily Beldoni, and the others. They've also included director Byrkit's original Test Footage (3:52, 16x9) for the dinner sequence and several of the actors involved, as well as a Theatrical Trailer (1:52, 16x9).
Final Thoughts:
Coherence accomplishes a lot on a very small budget, crafting a convincingly foreboding and mysterious cosmic anomaly around little more than a dinner party. James Ward Byrkit and Alex Manugian use their micro-budget limitations as an opportunity to try intriguing things with labyrinthine scripting, subversion of tropes, and free-form acting that emerges from vague objectives given to the performers before each shoot. What results is an intricately-constructed, detail-oriented enigma that largely succeeds in guiding the viewers' minds in desired directions; that said, its ambitiousness and intentional hands-off experimentation has its downfalls, where triggers in the plot are too on-the-nose observable in relation to the storytelling and the building dramatic energy works only as representations of realized individual characters instead of a cohesive unit of friends. Mildly Recommended, but I prefer other subtle science-fiction enigmas like The One I Love and Another Earth, whose dramatic throughlines compliment the strength of their reality-warping plotting.
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