He makes metaphysics, rather than scientific cogency, the film’s foundation, content to use Edwin Schrödinger’s thought experiment as an engine to explore the alternate self, how every decision is a stepping stone to the here and now. If that sounds unbearably erudite, writer-director James Ward Byrkit offsets the headiness with drollness, such as a reference to the 1998 Gwyneth Paltrow rom-com Sliding Doors. That duality is made plausible through brief recitations from a thick textbook on the finer points of quantum mechanics and a layman’s explanation of Schrödinger’s cat. Once they return, however, the narrative, which had been building slowly into a haunted-house attraction, with menacing noises at the door and ominous stories about Siberia’s Tunguska Event of 1908, realigns and turns diabolically quizzical, reimagining Mike Cahill’s Another Earth as a taut parlor game of possible parallel lives. But when the group realizes that a house down the street still possesses power, Hugh (Hugo Armstrong) and Amir (Alex Manugian), adhering to standard scary-movie convention, go sleuthing. It gathers four couples at a dinner party the same evening a comet passes Earth, an occurrence that promptly severs cellular communications and cuts electricity. Beginning as a more earnest Night of the Comet before swiftly morphing into an episode of the Twilight Zone without sacrificing its you-are-there vérité, Coherence is a low-budget chamber drama that firmly puts the psychological screws to its characters.
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