There’s still much to like about Coherence, particularly in it’s early stages. For much of the film, the relationship talk is a little tedious, and considering the nature of the situation they find themselves in, it hardly rings true. The film meanders towards a comment on human-relationships, and the multiple, minute components of which they comprise. It reaches the point where we don’t know which characters are from which reality, and how much of their ‘original’ self is still there. narratively, it becomes nigh on impossible to follow, but this seems largely intentional. What starts as a mysterious home-invasion thriller soon becomes a soap-opera spanning multiple dimensions, as attempts to tackle the more obvious concerns of the situation are eschewed in favour of an exploration into the relationships and fractured lives of the principal characters. If that sounds convoluted, that’s because it is, and Coherence makes no attempt to hold your hand through any of it. Here, they are the cat, the comet is the box, and the possibilities are not dead or alive, but infinite versions of their reality. The film explains itself with the analogy of Schrodinger’s cat, where a cat placed in a box with poison is simultaneously dead and alive until the box is opened. In essence, the comet creates multiple versions of the house and the friends at the party.

Eight friends meet at a dinner party (though for various reasons some of them don’t like each other all that much) a comet flies overhead, and then everything gets weird. Coherence is a tremendously difficult film to describe without the help of some diagrams and a great deal of time, so it’s best to keep it simple.

Coherence 2013