Nicholas Brendon plays a TV actor from the TV show Roswell.I hated dealing with the nightmares (which may, I admit, have been exacerbated by an excess of Nutella before bed), but I love that I managed to discover a little gem that I get to recommend wholeheartedly to anyone interested in the offbeat and disturbing.
#Coherence ending explained movie#
It’s been a long time since a movie disturbed me as much as this one did, but the disturbance was actually quite pleasing: comparable to Primer, another lowbudget mindbender, Coherence is thoughtful and trippy, like House of Leaves crossed with an as-yet-undiscovered garage band. (More on that below.) Her journey through the blackness, peering into the various houses-at one point seeing two Nicholas Brendons tied to chairs, marked with red and green glowsticks-felt like an ontological apocalypse. Towards the end of the film, the audience-identification character Em realizes that even the people she thinks are “her” people from “her” house are not “hers.” They haven’t been for a long time, and she has no way to get back to “her” people or even identify them. But once the situation became clear-not two houses but infinite houses, infinite groups-I got completely lost in the tension. The jostling confusion of various people moving in and out of the house, disappearing for periods of time then coming back, was disturbing. When the group realized that their house has a duplicate, a double, just a couple blocks away, inhabited by themselves, things got pleasingly odd. Typing that sentence feels slightly absurd, but this movie really did a number on me. There’s no flash here, no special effects of mindmelds or anything like that, just a deeply personal story of a group, and of individuals, coming apart at the seams as they are forced to reflect on the nature of their own existences. The nightmares I had about it were shot in the same shaky-cam, poorly lit style.īecause shaky-cam is exactly what the world would turn into if suddenly your neighborhood was not your neighborhood, the individual self was no longer a discreet entity, and you found yourself trapped in a logic puzzle with serious ontological-and even physical-stakes, with no hope for escape, especially once you realized the depth of your own predicament.
The handheld camera, tight locations (most of the movie takes place in the house), and semi-improvised dialogue made this movie seem vitally real. Haywire-as my lead quote implies-at the level of abstract physics, which is to say the sort of “mind-bending” concept that is delightful to read about and would be completely fucking horrifying to experience. Then, all sorts of unpredictable baggage as their phones break, the power goes out, and everything goes haywire. At first, all the predictable tensions of long-term friends dealing with long-term baggage over canapes and wine. Soon it becomes clear that nothing and no one are what they appear.”Īlthough calling it “sci-fi” implies more technology porn and metallic gleam than this low-budget movie contains, that description communicates the basic idea: a dinner party with friends while a comet passes. The logline for this film does a decent job of explaining the premise: “In this mind-bending sci-fi thriller, 8 friends at a dinner party start experiencing strange and mysterious events on the night a comet is passing close to Earth.
Then a spoiler kitten, below which lurk spoilers. Want even more? Here's my attempt to explain why this movie is awesome without spoiling its awesomeness.
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