They engage in routine dinner party chat, mentioning in passing some news about a comet due to pass overhead along with the usual updates and gossip. We get some sense of the relationships and some tensions as they gather.
MOVIE COHERENCE MOVIE
As the movie begins, eight friends are getting together for a dinner party. He literally shot it in his living room, with a cast of vaguely familiar looking but under the radar actors. James Ward Byrkit, who wrote “Rango” and created the visual design for the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies (all with Gore Verbinski), wanted to take some time away from seven-figure-budget blockbusters and create something small and intimate. As in all great thrillers, the scary stuff is not what’s on the outside, but what the stuff on the outside does to the stuff in the inside, meaning not just the inside of the characters but the inside of the audience. The less you know, the more you will enjoy this nifty thriller, which craftily makes the most of its micro-budget to maximize a deliciously mind-bending story. Whoa.Seriously, don’t read this review until after you’ve seen the movie. (And there was no recurring character called Joe on Roswell.) So, does this mean that all the weird, universe-shifting stuff that happens in Coherence perhaps started long before any of the dinner-party-goers noticed anything weird happening? Or has Coherence itself actually slipped into our universe from a parallel dimension? Now, it might be a funny in-joke if Nicholas Brendon, who plays Mike here, had actually been on Roswell, but in fact, in the exact same time period, he was playing Xander on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Laurie is stunned - she loved Roswell, and she doesn’t remember him at all. Here’s the thing that’s haunting me: Early on in the film, Laurie, a relative newcomer to the group, asks Mike what he does for a living, and he responds that he’s an actor, that he was on the hit 1990s show Roswell for four years as Joe, one of the main characters. How much of who we are is shaped by the things we think and do right at this moment? How inevitable are the things we think and do from moment to moment? If we met versions of ourselves who made just slightly different decisions, would we even notice? Writer-director James Ward Byrkit ( Rango) deploys some of the twistiest concepts from the realm where science becomes science fiction - stuff like Schroedinger’s cat and alternate realities - to warp the almost-clichéd one-location, one-evening dinner-party soap opera into a horror story of the human condition in the face of quantum philosophy. Stuff that I am loathe to reveal because part of the mind-bending fun of this deliciously tangled little SF flick is finding yourself in the frakked-up middle of the same weird situation as Em, Kevin, and their friends experience it when the power goes out and isolates this little group in the Los Angeles home of Mike (Nicholas Brendon) and Lee (Lorene Scafaria, writer-director of Seeking a Friend for the End of the World) the other couples are Amir (Alex Manugian: Rango) and Laurie (Lauren Maher: Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End), the latter of whom is Kevin’s ex and Hugh (Hugo Armstrong) and Beth (Elizabeth Gracen). See, just as Em (Emily Foxler: Ghosts of Girlfriends Past) is having to decide whether to fly off to Vietnam with her boyfriend, Kevin (Maury Sterling: Veronica Mars, The A-Team), for four months to accompany him for his work, there’s this crazy comet passing by planet Earth, and it’s messing with cell phones and doing other insane stuff. Not when there are important, even life-changing, decisions to be made at the same time.
MOVIE COHERENCE PRO
Pro relationship tip: Do not go to a dinner party with a bunch of your friends who all have long-term interconnected relationships - with all the unresolved resentments and secret entanglements that can come with that - when there’s a quantum anomaly in the neighborhood. (what is this about? see my critic’s minifesto) I’m “biast” (pro): I’m hungry for smart science fiction
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