New releases Coherence and The Signal combine human drama with high concepts on an indie budget.
Elizabeth Gracen, Lorene Scafaria, and Nicholas Brendon in Coherence.
Oscilloscope Laboratories
Giant interstellar shoot-outs and outlandish alien races are great and all, but science fiction is a genre that can benefit from limitations as much as it can big-budget space operatics. It's built on ideas, which means that with enough ingenuity, a smaller movie can do its own world-building by exploring a concept and how it affects people. Large-scope sci-fi may be big for the summer box office, but there's also a long tradition of scrappier films exploring time or space travel, dark futures, and new technology, all by way of how it affects a small group of characters, an approach that can be just as mind-bending without the visual effects. When you can't depend on simply showing how crazy a sci-fi phenomenon looks, for instance, you're forced to concentrate more on what the experience of dealing with it is like, and those tropes can serve as a metaphor for experiences that are closer to home for the audience.
That's the case for Coherence, an inventive indie written and directed by James Ward Byrkit that opens in New York and Los Angeles this Friday and expands to more cities in the weeks after. Coherence is the story of a dinner party in which eight friends with long and sometimes fraught histories gather to play catch-up while a comet passes overhead. When the power goes out, they notice there's a house two blocks away that remains lit, and a few of the guests venture out to see if they can use the phone. When they come back, one of them's bleeding and upset by what he saw, and the other is carrying a mysterious box he stole that turns out to be inexplicably filled with photos of everyone at the party.
Emily Baldoni and Maury Sterling in Coherence.
Oscilloscope Laboratories
Coherence doesn't play coy with what's happening to its characters, who soon discover that the comet seems to have left them in a temporarily fractured universe in which the house down the street is a sort of reflection made real, filled with other versions of themselves who are just as bewildered and alarmed by what's unfolding. The science behind the phenomenon is waved away with a few lines from a book about physics, because the real stakes in the story are about how little these people trust their alternate, equally paranoid selves — and they certainly don't trust one another.
This group of upper middle class suburbanites appear to be leading lives of glowing Californian success — Seeking a Friend for the End of the World director Lorene Scafaria plays Lee, one of the hosts, who's an executive at Skype, while her husband Mike (Buffy's Nicholas Brendon) is an actor who claims his biggest role, amusingly, was as the lead in Roswell (he's already living in an alternate universe). But a few drinks into the evening and insecurities, addictions, and infidelities begin coming out, all magnified by the stress of the strange phenomenon the party guests struggle to comprehend, particularly when they start to wonder if some of the members present aren't originals.
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