Coherence (2013) - Review
Some films feel engineered to impress you. Coherence isn't one of them. It feels like you've turned up at a mate's house for dinner and accidentally walked into an experiment you weren't supposed to see. That's part of its magic. It's tiny, unpolished, and shot like someone grabbed a camera because things were starting to get strange - and yet it ends up being more gripping than a lot of sci-fi with ten times the budget.
The setup is wonderfully mundane: a group of friends meet for a dinner party on the night a comet passes overhead. That's it. No dramatic prologue. No lecture about cosmic forces. Just familiar faces, old grudges, and the slight awkwardness that always happens when people who share a past try to pretend everything's normal. Then, without fanfare, something shifts. Not dramatically - no jump scare, no explosion - just a quiet, creeping sense that something is off.
This is where the film hooked me. There's a confidence to the way it uses small details: a phone screen cracking, a power cut, the strange tension when someone leaves the house and comes back slightly wrong. The entire film is basically eight people trying to make sense of a situation no one has the language for. And because most of the dialogue was improvised, it feels exactly like real people spiraling - talking over each other, making weird decisions, clinging to any scraps of logic they can find.
What makes Coherence so fun to watch is that it treats the audience like we're smart enough to keep up. It doesn't underline clues or pause to explain itself. It trusts us to notice when the patterns start forming, and that trust makes the whole thing oddly exciting. You end up doing the mental maths alongside the characters, trying to piece together a picture that keeps tilting the more you look at it.
Even the sci-fi concept - which I won't spoil - is handled with this scrappy sort of elegance. It's rooted in real physics ideas, but the film uses them in a playful, slightly chaotic way that suits the low-budget vibe. Instead of trying to be profound, it just lets the scenario run and watches what happens when the social fabric starts to tear.
There's a moment about halfway through where the film quietly revelas the real shape of what's going on, and it's fantastic. Not because it's a twist - it's not that kind of film - but because it reframes everything you've been watching in a way that feels simple, clever, and slightly sinister. From there, it becomes something much stranger and more unsettling, and by the time the ending lands, it leaves you with that lovely "I need to talk to someone about this" feeling.
Coherence is scrappy, clever, sometimes rough around the edges, and absolutely worth your time. If you like low-budget horror-adjacent sci-fi that values ideas over spectacle, this is the kind of film you watch, recommend to a friend, then end up rewatching because you want to see all the little tells you missed the first time.
It's one of those discoveries that reminds you why small films can hit harder than big ones.