Column Science Fiction Film Club Coherence: Dinner at My Place Tonight, Just Bring Yourself Schrödinger’s cat, astronomical anomalies, and parallel realities collide with an ill-fated dinner party. By Kali Wallace | Published on June 3, 2026 Credit: Bellanova Films / Ugly Duckling Films Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Bellanova Films / Ugly Duckling Films Coherence (2014) Written and directed by James Ward Byrkit. Starring Emily Foxler, Maury Sterling, Nicholas Brendon, Elizabeth Gracen, Lauren Maher, Alex Manugian, Lorene Scafaria, and Hugo Armstrong. Back in the early 1930s, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to fellow physicist Erwin Schrödinger as part of their ongoing correspondence trying to make sense of the more confounding aspects of quantum mechanics. Einstein was troubled by some of the interpretation put forth by their colleagues Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg. Einstein was particularly disgruntled by the idea that quantum systems exist simultaneously in a superposition of different states until they are observed, at which point the system collapses into a single state. In his letter to Schrödinger, Einstein said this idea was as ridiculous as a keg of gunpowder being both exploded and unexploded. It might work in the math, but it did not fit with the observable world. Schrödinger agreed and offered a more developed thought experiment: Imagine a cat in an enclosed box. Also within the box is a device that may or may not release a deadly poison, depending on a random quantum trigger, such as the radioactive decay of a single atom. According to Heisenberg and Bohr’s mathematical formulation, the state of that single atom—and therefore the release of the poison and fate of the cat—exists in a state where it is both decayed and not decayed until it is observed. That would mean the cat is both alive and dead until something is present to measure whether the atom controlling the poison’s release has decayed or not. This is obviously absurd in the real world, as we all know that any cat in a box is loafing adorably while you take twenty pictures of him because he’s the cutest little thing you’ve ever seen. But it wasn’t until physicists in the ’80s began finding experimental proof of some of the wilder ideas in quantum physics, such as particles being able to exist in a state of superposition, that Schrödinger’s cat began to shift from a fairly niche thought experiment meant to illustrate a key weakness of quantum mechanics to a simple metaphor meant to explain the model’s fundamental weirdness. That’s the version of the idea that grew into a pop cultural meme over the past few decades. Before that, sure, philosophers read about it and considered the implications, and sci fi writers were of course interested in the implications, with Ursula K. Le Guin often being credited as the first to bring the quantum cat into fiction… but definitely not the last. There are a lot of interpretations of quantum mechanics, because it has the dubious prestige of being the most rigorously tested and proven scientific theory humanity has yet devised, yet nobody can agree on what it means. Physicists love that, because it means there are always more bizarre mysteries for them to dig into, but they aren’t the only ones. Sci fi writers also love it, especially the “many worlds interpretation,” which was proposed by physicist Hugh Everett in the 1950s. In this interpretation, in that box with the cat, the radioactive atom set to release the poison both does and does not decay, meaning the cat both lives and dies in two different realities, because every quantum outcome exists in an infinite and infinitely multiplying number of possible worlds. There were stories about parallel universes or alternate timelines before the idea became a serious scientific concept, but not nearly as many as there have been in the decades since. It has become such a commonplace trope in mainstream fiction that it feels silly to even name examples, but I’m going to anyway because they include everything from the DC comics multiverses of the 1960s to Star Trek’s goateed Mirror universe to the ’90s show Sliders to the many Spider-verses of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) to the universe-hopping existentialism of Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022). When James Ward Byrkit and Alex Manugian (who also plays Amir in the film) started brainstorming the treatment that would become Coherence back in about 2013, the idea of multiple universes was definitely present in mainstream pop culture, even if it hadn’t yet become the focal point of multiple blockbuster Hollywood films. But the origin of the film didn’t come from science fictional ideas or themes. That would come later, when Byrkit was refining the idea and dug into the works of Stephen Hawking and other physicists to learn more. The origin of the film came from the unique way in which it was made. Or, to put it another way, it’s what happens when you invite eight actor friends over to your house and scare the daylights out of them for fun and profit. Byrkit was no stranger to Hollywood and filmmaking when he started thinking about making his own movie. He had worked as a storyboard and concept artist on Gore Verbinski’s three Pirates of the Caribbean films and had co-written the animated film Rango (2011)—all of which were huge productions with massive budgets, big-name stars, and major studio backing. Those experiences made him want to try something completely different: a film that wasn’t controlled by executive decisions and corporate demands down to the last detail. “I missed the days where it was just me, some actors, and a story. I wondered what it would look like to strip it down to the bare minimum of elements—to get rid of the crew, the script, and to just have the camera and actors,” he said in a 2014 interview. That didn’t mean he would jump right in without preparation. There was, in fact, a huge amount of preparation behind Coherence. He and Manugian sat down to brainstorm what kind of story they could tell in a film with a bare-bones production, and the cultural touchstone they landed on was Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone (1959-1964). As a weekly, half-hour anthology television series, each episode of The Twilight Zone combined basic settings with unknown characters to explore heady and bizarre scenarios. It’s a show that does a lot with a little, in other words, which makes it an appealing model for somebody who wants to make a movie without using many resources. So Byrkit decided the setting would be his living room, and the premise would be “a Twilight Zone-like fractured reality.” Then he spent about a year figure out exactly how that would work. He cites the episode “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” as the primary influence; that’s the episode about a neighborhood descending into paranoia and violence when a meteor passes overhead and they lose contact with the rest of the world. Another inspiration was Roman Polanski’s film Carnage (2011), which is about two couples losing their shit when they have a dinner party to discuss a childish fight between their sons. When Coherence was making the festival rounds, just about every single interviewer also asked Byrkit about Primer (2007), because Primer is the film everybody goes to when they think “high-concept micro-budget sci fi filmed in somebody’s house.” Byrkit acknowledges that he saw Primer and took its success as a sign that there was an audience for that sort of film. I agree with him that they are very different stories that approach their ideas in different ways, even though both fall into the category of “ordinary people in weird sci fi scenarios.” In Coherence, the characters don’t start out thinking they are in a weird sci fi scenario. Lee (Lorene Scafaria) and Mike (Nicholas Brendon) are hosting a dinner party for their friends, who are all the most stereotypical white middle-aged Californians you’ve ever seen in your life. There’s Em (Emily Foxler) and Kevin (Maury Sterling), who are going through a rough patch. There’s Hugh (Hugo Armstrong) and Beth (Elizabeth Gracen), who has brought the all-natural organic ketamine-spiked tincture. And there’s Amir (Manugian), who has brought along Laurie (Lauren Maher), who nobody seems to like because she’s Kevin’s ex. There’s a comet passing overhead, but it is otherwise a very normal night. They are drinking wine and eating dinner when strange things start to happen. First, their phones aren’t working; a few of the screens randomly shatter. Then the power goes out everywhere except at one other house nearby. Hugh and Amir head out to see if they can use the phone at that house, but they return injured and rattled and insisting that they witnessed something impossible: the other house is this house, filled with their doppelgangers. It spirals outward from there. As soon as somebody brings up Schrödinger’s cat and the 1998 film Sliding Doors, we know exactly what kind of movie we’re in, even if we don’t know where it will go. That’s intentional, because we’re supposed to gain this genre awareness as the characters gain it. They want to believe they’re all hallucinating, but they keep running into versions of themselves, which makes denial a bit difficult. To preserve the feeling of weirdness inflicted upon an evening of normalcy, Byrkit didn’t write a script. What he did instead was pick actors he knew to be willing and able to handle improvisation. He gave them each some guiding notes, but nobody knew the whole story except Manugian, who helped write the treatment and knew the major twists and turns. For five nights, they filmed at Byrkit’s house, letting the actors improvise wildly as the tiny crew threw curveballs into the mix. (There seems to have been some preparation in the form of a short trial run, so they weren’t going into the process completely blind.) The actors all agreed to this and, after an initial adjustment period, it seems like they enjoyed themselves. (Even Scafaria, who actually had to cook for the others as part of playing the dinner party host, but also actually got to take a nap in the middle of it.) There are so many stories out there about directors subjecting actors to unpleasantness to get genuine reactions, but this was more like giving some seasoned professionals a specific scenario and letting them play out a nerdy sci fi RPG for a few nights. In one interview Byrkit specifically said, “We set out to make a B-movie. We didn’t set out to make a talky, indie high-art film.” He specifically picked chatty extroverts so there wouldn’t be awkward lulls, and when they got hung up in places or the story needed to move along, he would step in and give them a nudge. (One example: When Hugh and Amir first return to the house, the other actors were so wound up they refused to let them inside. Which is, well, a little ironic. Considering.) The actors had personal details and any information their characters would know, such as Em’s story about missing out on a major career opportunity or the book belonging to Hugo’s physicist brother. But they weren’t told how or when to share that information, and nobody had guidance about what to do with it. They also didn’t know when external events would intrude upon their dinner party; their startled reactions to the first knock at the door are genuine, as they were all getting so into the scenario they didn’t expect a change. There were, naturally, some problems with making a film this way. Directors of photography Arlene Muller and Nic Sadler had to deal with the obvious technical challenge of following eight people around a house for several hours. They had to suffuse the main areas with light, except for when the lights go out and the characters are using candles or glowsticks, but they also had to keep the few exterior shots completely dark. They had to somehow keep everybody in focus, even when everybody was moving around unpredictably. They didn’t quite manage that, as there are several places where the lack of focus gives a sort of pseudo-cinéma vérité look, which is not exactly what they were going for. The editing is also quite jumpy, in part because editor Lance Pereira was piecing together five nights of improv and in part because the movie as a whole is piecing together an unspecified number of realities joined together by a cosmic “roulette wheel” that shunts the characters unexpectedly into different worlds. I think the film is edited together quite well overall, and I think the movie works overall, but I fully admit I have no interest in going through the movie and tracing every single character or thread to see if it all fits. Not only does that sound very tedious, but I also think it’s pretty much beside the point. The movie is filmed so that we’re in the scenario with the characters. When they start trying to figure out what’s going on, we want them to make some progress toward a solution, but we also understand how freaked out and curious they are. When they realize the physics book and the comet knowledge won’t help them, we’re as lost as they are. (The comet story from 1920s Finland was made up, which makes me a little sad. I was prepared to go down a rabbit hole learning about weird historical comet happenings.) When they start to piece together the fact that people have swapped worlds without knowing, we get to feel those jolts of surprise and discomfort. Overall, I found this to be an enjoyable movie to watch, and I’ll probably watch it again to pick up more details next time. It plays out at a nice pace, with a good number of surprises and twists, and we really do want the characters to get through it. It all builds together to make Em’s search for a world that hasn’t noticed what’s going on, and the violence she resorts to in order to stay there, all the more haunting. Part of my enjoyment comes from knowing that it was an experiment in creative filmmaking, an artistic passion project, and it worked. I love the idea of stripping away everything we associate with modern sci fi films—the huge productions, the special effects, the big stakes—and exploring what’s left. I love the idea of figuring out what kind of weird, twisty, surprising stories can be told in a limited setting with a lot of careful planning, some clever guidelines, and a willing cast. I am always delighted by people finding more ways to tell the stories they want to tell. What do you think of Coherence? Have you ever been to a California dinner party that ended up like that? You can share in comments. We want to know. If you’re wondering how much the movie cost: Most reports put the budget at $50,000. Those reports do not include information about whether Lorene Scafaria had to buy the garlic chicken she cooked for the dinner party. Next week: I do love a story about a cult, so we’re watching Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s The Endless (2017). Find it online. I’ll probably also talk a bit about their 2012 debut film Resolution, which is a prequel of sorts to The Endless but it is not at all necessary to watch beforehand. (I swear that makes sense, but it’s a huge spoiler to explain how or why.)[end-mark] The post <i>Coherence</i>: Dinner at My Place Tonight, Just Bring Yourself appeared first on Reactor.