James Ward Byrkit
Coherence

This film is practically from start to finish entirely based on principles of space-time physics applied to social behaviors and theories on the multiverse. All this, of course, without being a pretentious and difficult film or even convoluted: after all, what it probably asks of you is to continue yourself the same speculative processes that engage the characters in a sort of time continuum that may be unproductive but is typical of human nature.

The plot of 'Coherence' (2013), a film directed by James Ward Byrkit, is a sci-fi thriller as simple as it is complicated to fully understand its dynamics and to argue logically without falling into the various traps that might present themselves in the reasoning process.

There are eight friends, four couples, who gather at the home of one of them. It is an evening considered special for astronomy enthusiasts because the celestial vault will be crossed by the passage of a particular comet that will pass close to Earth and be visible to the naked eye, an event that hasn't occurred - as we learn directly from the main protagonist of the film, the dancer Emily (Emily Baldoni) - since 1923. A date that Emily remembers particularly well, having read about the events related to that coincidence and when in Finland people began to behave strangely. The people felt lost and somehow no longer recognized themselves or the reality surrounding them.

I admit that after hearing about this episode recounted in the film, I did a very brief search on the web to see if the news was true or invented by the author of the story told in the film and used instrumentally, but I found no particular reference. Let's take it for what it is in any case: in the end, truth or fiction, the news has a ‘folkloric’ character in any case, as might be the case with news related to a UFO sighting.

The evening proceeds calmly, although as we will discover, there are reasons that can seriously jeopardize the relationships between some of the characters and consequently the harmony of the entire group, until a blackout occurs that prompts them to leave the house. In the film, there is a reference to the famous Schrödinger's cat paradox, the one according to which as long as the cat is inside the box, it can be both alive and dead at the same time. Let's apply it to the inhabitants of the house from that precise moment: from then on, everything changes and will never be the same again.

An unspecified number of parallel universes, in fact, seem to intersect at that exact point, where all the homes are identical and in all, more or less the same events occur, and there are eight copies of each character for each home. The natural distrust that each group will harbor towards the others and particularly towards their alter ego and counterpart at this point will drive the various characters to continuously enter and exit from one house to another, until it becomes practically impossible for each of them to know exactly where they are and with whom they are dealing with.

The film is practically all here: not surprisingly, as stated by the director, the script that the actors had at their disposal was very sparse and offered few indications, leaving much room for improvisation. Practically, after all, what we are witnessing is a happening, a trans-dimensional pantomime where everyone interprets themselves poorly or in a more or less imperfect way and in the impossibility that there can exist two perfectly identical and coinciding dimensions. A sort of theatrical performance where everyone acts a different script of the same story.

There are no climactic moments, nor any use of special effects in a film that evidently does not need them at all. The tension remains constant from start to finish, and even without a sensational ending and the presence of what can indeed be inconsistencies (but how could it be otherwise) within the plot, 'Coherence' keeps the viewer attentive for the entire duration of the film, and perhaps even afterward if they engage in discussions or reflections on an impossible theme to resolve such as that of the existence of multiple realities and parallel universes.