One Of The Best Sci-Fi Thrillers You've Never Seen Will Totally Break Your Brain

The other night, I had a hankering to watch a good high-concept movie I'd never seen before. I saw 2014's "Coherence" on a few lists, and being almost wholly unfamiliar with it, I decided to fire it up and give it a shot. Thankfully, this film gave me exactly what I was looking for.

Emily Baldoni, Maury Sterling, Nicholas Brendon, Elizabeth Gracen, Alex Manugian, Lauren Maher, Hugo Armstrong, and eventual "Hustlers" director Lorene Scafaria star in this ultra-low budget brain melter about a group of friends gathering for a dinner party while a comet passes by overhead. When the power goes out, a couple of them trek up the street to a neighboring house with the lights on — only to discover something that shakes them to their core. I won't get into the specifics here, but the film has an incredible conceit, and director James Ward Byrkit, who shot the movie over five nights at his own house, is able to milk huge amounts of tension and drama from the scenario he and Manugian cooked up here. 

Byrkit opted for a "Curb Your Enthusiasm" approach to shooting, largely letting the actors improvise their dialogue as long as they hit key plot points in order to achieve a more lived-in, realistic vibe. That technique could easily backfire, resulting in a movie that feels too shaggy for its own good. But the cast is up to the challenge, and the central conflict is so strong that the film never has room for useless tangents or "why'd they do that?" deviations. Once the narrative takes off like a rocket after only a few minutes of character work, it's time to grab hold and don't let go until the credits roll.

Shane Carruth's 2004 movie "Primer" has a legendary reputation among cinephiles as perhaps the preeminent mind-bending low-budget science fiction movie of the modern era. That's a fascinating movie, and absolutely worth seeking out if you've never seen it. But it's also notoriously complex — so much so that there's a whole infographic dedicated to trying to untangle the web of timelines from "Primer." It's all but impossible to understand everything you're seeing on first viewing, and that's actually a big part of the reason it has such devoted fans.

"Coherence," on the other hand, shares a similar low-fi aesthetic and thrilling, reality-warping premise, but it also doesn't disappear so far down the rabbit hole that you need a guide to understand it. It's captivating enough that it easily holds your attention and keeps you on the edge of your seat, but isn't so opaque that you'll leave the film confused and unsatisfied. That doesn't mean "Coherence" is dumb: In fact, I think it's so effective that it should be passed around and discussed among cinephiles in the same breath as "Primer." Small budget be damned: "Coherence" belongs in the pantheon of modern sci-fi classics.

We spoke a little about "Coherence" (and several other movies) on today's episode of the /Film Daily podcast, which you can listen to below:

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