Coherence (2013)

I feel like I speak a lot about psychological thrillers set at dinner parties. It’s easy to see why they're so popular, and I've written about before - they're an easy and effective set up, with minimal exposition, that throws our characters into a situation together and allows for the weird shit to go down. In Coherence, a comet is passing overhead, and weird shit goes down.

It’s hard to talk thoroughly about this movie without going into spoiler territory, but I’d say that if you’re a fan of when movies get a little pseudo-science and quasi-cerebral, you'll probably get into Coherence. I'm trying to draw comparisons: the most obvious comparison is to another recent dinner party thriller, The Invitation, which I haven't posted my review for yet. It also very strongly evoked the movie Triangle for me, which you'll probably like if you get into this one or vice versa. It's like a time travel movie for people who don't want to watch a time travel movie. In that respect, it does occasionally struggle on the usual points: often it tries to do too much and frequently tries to over-explain something that really needed a level of ambiguity to allow for the suspension of disbelief. There were entire plotlines I just stopped caring about, because the main throughline of the story was so interesting that I could not bring myself to care about a weird blackmail subplot.

I thought it ended up being incredibly effective in its portrayal of tropes - there were subversions, there were points of interest, there was enough that was compelling when it did have to do its job and pull those out. There were definitely conveniences and cliches, but there were also little things that got under my skin, and I appreciated that. At the same time, it lacked some of the obnoxious moments that pulled me from The Invitation - it had a weird authenticity about it that I attribute to the screenplay and the dialogue. There are definitely bits that could have been cut, but I do feel like that would sacrifice some of those moments of realness. Also, the cuts-to-black feel jarring at first, but are explained as the film continues. The ending was a bit underwhelming, but until those final few moments, I was all in.

Rating: 8.5/10 - Bar the problems that come along with tackling something science adjacent, it was a pretty gripping film, and worth pushing through the flaws for. A solid dinner party thriller, for sure.