Coherence (2014)

Eight friends gather for a dinner party on the night a comet passes overhead, and the evening proceeds to fracture into an unknown number of parallel realities. James Ward Byrkit shot the thing in his own living room over five nights with a cast of acquaintances and no script, and the result is a tidy, claustrophobic puzzle box. It is also, from the standpoint of contemporary social consciousness, an almost aggressively empty vessel. The comet is a physics problem. It is not a metaphor for anything.

On the matter of representation, the ensemble is white, straight, and gainfully employed in vaguely creative professions. No character is coded as neurodivergent, no body is presented as a site of political meaning, and the climate does not enter the conversation even as a catastrophe hangs in the sky overhead. The dinner party bickers about infidelity and quantum decoherence, not about class, capital, or the patriarchy. Race is absent. Not ignored, exactly. Simply not a category the film has any use for. The romantic entanglements are entirely heterosexual and entirely unhappy, which is a tradition in its own right.

The film offers two faint signals and little else. Emily, the protagonist, shoulders the climactic act of survival, sedating her own double and stuffing her into a car trunk with a resourcefulness that borders on the feral. The screenplay makes no argument about gender while doing this. She acts because the plot requires a survivor, not because the film has a thesis. Elsewhere, the characters cite Schrodinger's cat and quantum decoherence, but the exposition arrives as puzzle mechanics, spoken by people who are mostly drunk and frightened. Nobody turns to the camera to explain what it all means about us. A rare and restful thing.