“This whole night we’ve been worrying there’s some dark version of us out there somewhere. What if we’re the dark version?”

Justin’s rating: My number is 80 if anyone was curious

Justin’s review: Do you ever get dragged against your will into a movie because everyone’s been recommending it to you… but you worry that you might dread the experience? That’s how I felt about Coherence. It kept coming up on a lot of “modern scifi classics” list, but I worried that it was going to be a tense, stressful experience from what little I heard of it. But sometimes the things we fear turn out not to be scary at all, so sometimes you need to bite the bullet and see anyway. And at least I can return to tell you about it?

If I had to pitch Coherence to you without spoiling it, I’d say that it is to the multiverse as Primer is to time travel. That is, it attempts to take a low-budget, highly complex approach to an overused scifi concept. and if that’s enough for you to see it, then pull the ejection lever from this review and go see it. Otherwise, read on.

At a slightly uncomfortable dinner party in North Carolina (with Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Nicholas Brendon!), the power goes out, the internet dies, and several cell phones crack when a comet passes by overhead. It gets strange — a whole lot more strange — as the group investigates the only house in the neighborhood with lights on… and finds out that it’s their house with other versions of them.

And it turns out that it’s not the only house copy out there.

I guess the idea here is that instead of the normal multiverse trope of jumping between realities, Coherence brings shards of the multiverse to the same location. It gets odder and odder as the group encounters their lookalikes and sees what may be happening in other universes.

Lots of questions start popping up at this point. Who are the real people from the first party and who are the others? What is the meaning of a lockbox with photographs of the people and various items? What’s up with the numbers? Is time travel in play here as well? Will all of these realities collapse and eliminate everyone but those in a single house? How does Schrödinger’s cat affect this situation?

All I can tell you is that Coherence is as stressful a watch as I assumed. It’s clearly designed to keep you on edge for its 90-minute runtime, with tight shots against faces, a shaky camera, an unsettling soundtrack, and paranoid characters that were already sporting some unpleasant attitudes. I do admire that a rather deep scifi flick was crafted here with bare minimal special effects and, effectively, a single setting (the house). I admire it — but I don’t recommend it.

From reading up on this movie, the director himself had to create flow charts as to keep track of the plot and the interactions, which probably tells you how likely you are to understand it on your first watch. Or your tenth. I think some people automatically find themselves wowed at any movie that can both intrigue and confuse them, like you’re talking with someone vastly smarter than yourself.

But while I’m fine with some mystery, open-ended interpretations, and complexity, I have little patience for too much obfuscation. You keep things convoluted just to hold it over the audience? I’m going to pull my own ejection lever.

Intermission!

• “If you don’t say yes, it becomes a no.”
• Nicholas Brendon was on a lot of TV, but not Roswell as a regular
• All of the smash cuts to black are disconcerting
• The broken glass
• The box and the pictures
• The double notes
• “We’re not splitting up, we’re just going in two different groups.”
• The red glow sticks
• “The clues are still here.”
• Drunk Mike is best Mike
• “What was the other Mike like?”
• “I’m the attorney for Grizzly Adams.”
• The numbers as multi-factor authentication
• “The rest of us are not from this house. We are visitors.”
• I remember when they used Nicholas Brendon’s identical twin brother in Buffy — makes sense they’d use him again here.