Coherence

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. Not when there are important, even life-changing, decisions to be made at the same time.

See, just as Em (Emily Foxler) is having to decide whether to fly off to Vietnam with her boyfriend, Kevin (Maury Sterling), 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. Stuff that I am loathe to reveal because part of the mind-bending fun of this deliciously tangled little sci-fi flick is finding yourself in the frakked-up middle of the same weird situation as Em, Kevin, and their friends when the power goes out and isolates this little group in the Los Angeles home of Mike (Nicholas Brendon) and Lee (Lorene Scafaria). The other couples are Amir (Alex Manugian) and Laurie (Lauren Maher), the latter of whom is Kevin’s ex; and Hugh (Hugo Armstrong) and Beth (Elizabeth Gracen).

Writer-director James Ward Byrkit 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.

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. Laurie is stunned—she loved Roswell, and she doesn’t remember him at all. 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. (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?

Whoa.

Coherence (3) • Directed by James Ward Byrkit • Starring Emily Baldoni, Maury Sterling, Nicholas Brendon • Not rated • 89 minutes • At Osio Cinemas.