Running Parallel

I have a certain love for time travel and alternate reality stories. I tend to lump the two of them together because they usually travel hand-in-hand. A traveler finds themselves back in time, and then they realize once they get home again that something has changed and their whole reality is different. Or there’s an alternate reality we’re seeing, and we have to piece together what changed somewhere in the past that caused this new, branching storyline to occur. Generally even if time travel hasn’t caused a change, we still think about alternate realities through a lens of changes to a timeline.

Coherence is different, and that’s part of what makes it interesting. The film puts a group of friends together and then watches as they end up experiencing a kind of alternate reality break. Different versions of themselves from different versions of reality wander back and forth across the realities, and over time the various groups have to try and figure out where they are, how they are, and sometimes even who they are, all in the span of a single night. That alone feels somewhat different.

But what’s really interesting is that these alternate versions aren’t really all that different at all. It’s not like an episode of Rick and Morty where some versions come from a world of Cronenbergs, others from a world where everyone is insects, and so on. No, this quantum break happens, and then very similar versions of the same people all start milling about. And for a while they don’t even truly understand what’s been going on. They get there over time, and the way the film slowly unfolds its mysteries is part of what makes it so compelling. It’s an alternate reality film that almost feels like a bottle episode, in a way, and it somehow manages to defy expectations in the process.

The film follows a group of friends – Emily Foxler as Emily, Maury Sterling as Kevin, Nicholas Brendon as Mike, Lorene Scafaria as Lee, Hugo Armstrong as Hugh, Elizabeth Gracen as Beth, Alex Manugian as Amir, Lauren Maher as Laurie – as they get together at Mike and Lee’s house for a dinner party. This is the first time the group has gotten together as a group in a few months, and there’s a lot of catching up for the group to do as they slowly cycle in, get comfortable, grab drinks, and share dirt. And all of this happens on the night that Miller’s Comet passes Earth.

Things get weird at some point, though, after a power outage knocks out the whole block. Mike and Lee have a backup generator, though, which they turn on, but soon after they do they notice that another house further down the road also still has power. Finding that curious, a couple of members of the group head out to contact that other house and see if they know what’s going on. The two guys, Hugh and Amir, disappear down the road, and then are gone for a long time. Meanwhile, someone bangs on the side door of the house, but then vanishes. Hugh and Amir come back, but Hugh is bleeding and his story sounds spotty. The group is confused, not knowing what’s going on, but they slowly start to suspect that this Hugh and Amir aren’t their Hugh and Amir… and that there might be more duplicates in their group than they realize…

Coherence builds slowly, easing us into its sci-fi concept without overloading us. It’s not really a high concept film when you consider that it focuses on a small group of people, a simple idea, and a single location. All of that works to the film’s favor, though, as it sets us into this world, with this group of friends, and lets them guide us into the whole situation in an indirect way. It’s just a group of people getting together for a dinner party, and then something weird eventually happens. But nothing too big, or too weird, so as to completely offset everything we understand and know.

A lot of that, of course, is due to the fact that this is a very low budget film (made for $50,000 total), with a bunch of C-list actors (Nicholas Brendon, of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame, was probably the biggest name in the cast at the time), so the film could really only do so much. I liken it to a bottle episode because most of the action takes place at a single location. The characters congregate at Mike and Lee’s house (or, at the very least, one version of Mike and Lee’s house, although it’s hard to know if we even consistently stay at that version) and only occasionally do they go outside to the street in front of the house, walking back and forth along that road. There are no special effects, no filming tricks. It’s just a house and a group of people.

Well, I say there’s no tricks, but the film does have one special effect it uses pretty well: Nicholas Brendon’s twin brother, Kelly Donovan, who cameos for a couple of scenes when the film needs to have Mike confront a different version of Mike. Buffy the Vampire Slayer actually used the same trick, when Xander was split into two versions of himself and they shared a few short scenes together. It’s a solid bit and works well in the context of this film, helping to see the multiple realities we’re supposed to see on screen.

Because of the constrained budget and controlled nature of the set, it’s hard to even really call this sci-fi, not in the way we commonly think of it. It’s easier to say that this is science fantasy, or even just space magic, as it’s implied that the comet passing by Earth somehow causes a soft spot that allows the dinner guests to wander along a dark path on the road and end up in a different reality. How that works is never really well explained (someone has a quantum physics text book, but this feels like a passing handwave to say, “sure, there’s probably some science that justifies it”), but that also doesn’t really matter in the context of the film.

Instead, what’s really important is how the characters react to the situation. This is a storytelling bottle, or sometimes akin to a locked room for the characters. All they can do is stay in the house they’re in or go down the road to a different version of the same house. They don’t have anywhere else to go, and because of that, they start getting really stressed out. They begin to doubt each other, bicker, fight, and make terrible decisions. All because they aren’t sure who is one of “theirs” and who is from another reality… and they can’t tell if that matters or not.

All of it builds to a pretty good climax. The people are stressed, the situation is messed up, and eventually we get a form of release (although no spoilers here). You can’t go into Coherence expecting a sci-fi film because that would imply that the film is interested in proving a point and “solving” the situation. Instead, think of it like a thriller, one where everyone is suspect and no one can be trusted. You have to accept that there won’t be a ton of answers, and that you might not come away even liking all the characters, but that you will get a satisfying story within the bounds of this friend group and this strange situation. Accept that and Coherence is a treat. It’s a solid bit of low-budget storytelling done very well.