
Suffice to say that while the story’s revelations are diverting enough, the implications are sometimes chilling for the wrong reasons: The idea that we might be stuck in an eternal loop (or “roulette wheel,” as one character calls it) with some of the movie’s more insufferable characters - Mike with his boozy, knuckleheaded ideas, Beth with her feng shui and her ketamine-and-valerian cocktails - is indeed a disquieting one to contemplate.

#MOVIE COHERENCE SERIES#
Once more we find ourselves at a dinner party whose guests find themselves hard pressed to escape, thanks largely to complications provided by an invasive celestial body and a series of … well, to say more would spoil the modest fun. There are playful early hints of what’s to come: Em shares a story about her past experience as a dancer that leads to a pointed conversation about parallel lives and stolen destinies Mike, it turns out, once starred on the sci-fi series “Roswell.” And in short order, accompanied by the foreboding shudder of Kristin Ohrn Dyrud’s minimalist score, the comet makes its big entrance, shutting down everyone’s cell phones and causing a massive power outage - a minor inconvenience compared with the Moebius-strip craziness of what happens next.Īlthough Byrkit confines his actors and his largely unscripted story to the house, “Coherence” soon reveals its true setting to be some nocturnal twilight zone located at the juncture of Luis Bunuel’s “The Exterminating Angel,” Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia” and Shane Carruth’s “Primer,” all superior exercises in cine-surrealism. Part cerebral sci-fi and part relationship drama, COHERENCE is a tightly focused, intimately shot film that quickly ratchets up with. Byrkit sets the scene and the table nicely enough, establishing a warm candlelit atmosphere of friendly chit-chat and vaguely discernible tension, even if his storytelling choices - overlapping dialogue, banal digressions, excessively wobbly camerawork, extreme closeups and jagged editing - at times strain too hard for authenticity.īut then, perhaps the fragmented indie roughness of it all - particularly the way editor Lance Pereira ends nearly every scene with an abrupt cut to black - is meant to signify a deeper rift in the film’s universe. Her music for Coherence is her first commercial soundtrack release.Arriving one fateful evening at the cozy suburban home of acerbic actor Mike (Nicholas Brendon) and his affable wife, Lee (Lorene Scafaria), pretty Em (Emily Foxler) is the closest figure to a protagonist in a group that also includes her boyfriend, Kevin (Maury Sterling) older married couple Hugh (Hugo Armstrong) and Beth (Elizabeth Gracen) and the annoying Amir (Alex Manugian), who has thoughtlessly brought along one of Kevin’s exes, Laurie (Lauren Maher), as his date. She regularly works on commercials with HUM Music and arranged the currently used version of the Jeopardy opening theme. Kristin graduated from the USC film scoring program in 2005 and had scored a number of films since then: her Music for The Attic Door won the award of Best Film Score at the Bend Film Festival. On the night of an astronomical anomaly, eight friends at a dinner party experience a troubling chain. She wrote her first composition entitled “Chinese Dance” at the age of five which already showed her early fascination with Oriental culture. Starring: Emily Baldoni, Maury Sterling, Nicholas Brendon. Kristin Øhrn Dyrud is a Norwegian composer living and working in LA. As the unusual circumstances bring out the buried issues among the eight friends gathered for a dinner party.

The story takes place during a single night when a comet arrives to Earth with staggering consequences: glasses break in, cellphones shatter and even the power goes off in all but one house in the street. Written and directed by James Ward Byrkit, Coherence is an independent science-fiction / relationship drama, focusing on the life of eight people caught up in the aftermath of an astronomical anomaly. MovieScore Media tackles another exciting and experimental science fiction score with Coherence, written by Norwegian-born composer Kristin Øhrn Dyrud. Digital: iTUNES | AMAZON | eMUSIC | SPOTIFY
