Coherence. Written and directed by James Ward Byrkit.
Rating: 8 (out of 10)
After a summer of blockbuster excess, it's time for a little reminder that filmmakers can occasionally make a big splash with a drop-in-thebucket budget.
Enter Coherence, a film written, produced and directed by James Ward Byrkit.
Despite tight finances and tighter shooting schedule - just five nights - Byrkit has crafted a thoughtful sci-fi mystery that plays with the concepts of identity, reality and, ultimately, the importance of not getting rid of your land line.
The evening begins with a typical yuppie dinner party: bring your own bottle and bring your own baggage. Each guest has some secret regret that they bring to the table, literally.
Em (Emily Baldoni) is a dancer who nearly made it; Mike (Nicholas Brendan) is a TV actor no one can remember; Em's beau Kevin (Maury Serling) may still have the hots for Laurie (Lauren Mahir); assorted substance-abuse spectres and career disappointments lurk just below the surface.
Em arrives at the house after having had her cell phone crack while she was holding it in her hand. Weird, no one else can get cell service at all. Could it have anything to do with the comet, scheduled to pass unusually close to Earth that night?
Em indulges in a little comet history and how it can make people loopy. (Not 1984's Night of the Comet Valley-girl crazy, but crazy for real.) After the lights go out Hugh (Hugo Armstrong) decides to wander over to the only lighted house in the neighbourhood and phone his astrophysicist brother, who instructed him to phone if anything seemed amiss as the comet passed. Hugo returns distraught. He and Amir (Alex Manugian) have seen a mirror of their dinner party: same house, same people.
And they return with a box full of unnerving clues. Initially there are all kinds of theories about what is causing all the strange incidents: Beth (Elizabeth Gracen) talks about a freaky feng shui "vortex" in the house; one of the guests may be a tiny bit psychic; someone else may have put an echinaceaketamine cocktail in the food.
Meanwhile there are all sorts of handheld-camera scares and things that go bump in the dark. There's a pertinent discussion about Schrodinger's Cat Theory and all sorts of alternatereality weirdness. But Byrkit's is a pared-down quantum physics lesson, and thanks to some colourcoded glow sticks the proposed theories are easy for the audience to follow. Ever in the background is the question: which version of ourselves would we choose, if we could? Which would we let die?
The only members of crew permitted on set during the five-night shoot were the cameramen. Coherence is experimental in that there was no script, just a notecard given to the actors each morning describing their character's general motivation, plus the occasional detail to work into the dialogue. With no knowledge of where the other actors were going during the scene, the result is a real-time, largely improvised experience.
It sounds slap-dash, but it's not. A committed and expressive ensemble cast keeps the fear real until daylight comes. What happens next is a whole other story.
