Coherence
“Coherence (2013)”
Text By: Basil Swartzfager
Original Publication Date: August 5th, 2014
Location is central to Coherence’s premise. Made on a fairly low budget, the film takes place primarily inside a single house and over the course of a single night. This confinement of narrative goes hand in hand with the sense of entrapment the film tries to foster. As the characters’ psyches become increasingly fractured and nerve-ridden the house oscillates between being an alien structure, unsettling in its familiarity, and being a womb-like sanctuary insulating the characters from the ominous outdoors. Having established the house’s centrality, and its importance in the narrative, Coherence’s first objective should have been to establish the physicality in a meaningful way. An understanding of the space, what it feels like to move through it, where rooms are in relation to each other, and the comfort that comes with inhabiting the house, should have been at the top of the filmmakers’ agenda. As my foreshadowing no doubt indicates, the filmmakers failed in this duty. At one point one of the characters comments on bad feng shui, and the negative energy emanating from one of the house’s corners. This film has bad cinematic feng shui. At no point did I have a clear understanding of space and flow, and as such the film never felt as comforting and familiar in the beginning nor as scary and alienating by the end as James Ward Byrkit no doubt intended.
Part of the film’s problem comes in its visual styling. A typical visual strategy would be to begin with well-composed shots of the characters in the house, arriving, having dinner, enjoying each other’s company, etc. and film could then increasingly decenter and fracture these shots as the tension ramped up. I think this would have been a strong strategy. Coherence is short on compelling characters, and most of its narrative thrust is built on mystery, tension, and the conceptual gimmick of the film’s narrative. But instead the film creates a low-rent mimicry of Paul Greengrass’ hyper-verite “you are there” visual style. The film consists primarily of medium close-ups that shake, dip, and zoom seemingly without purpose as focus slips in and out. When the film occasionally does cut to a long shot, the compositions are confusing and poorly set up. An early long shot of the characters at a dining room table in which the left side of the frame is dominated by a tall house plant that throws the entire composition out of balance. This lack of attention to how framing and camera movement can affect an audience undermines the film’s desire to escalate the narrative flow from ominous in the beginning to terrifying and disturbing at the film’s conclusion. The style never changes, creating an emotional flatline that the narrative resolutions can’t overcome.
This lack of stylistic shifts similarly undermines the film’s inside/outside dichotomy. The impatient, bobbling camera never allows the audience to feel comfortable within the home and the outdoors is ignored for most of the film’s set up, never giving the audience a reason to be suspicious of its safety. Thus when the power goes out and two characters contemplate going outside to ask for help from a house down the street, I was baffled why so many other characters objected and tried to convince them to stay in. The film had stuck so closely to the point-of-view of conversational dinner party that, even as the dialogue dropped hints of danger in the future, I never once felt a sense of entrapment for the characters. The film shifts gears so quickly, and without an appropriate shift in visual tone, that I found it difficult to follow the emotional beats and be as scared as the characters were. A similar scene happens a few minutes later, after the characters leave to check out the house, when a loud pounding on a door terrifies the characters to the point where one grabs a baseball bat before opening it. It turns out the loud knock came from the house’s side door, rather than the front door, but this is not explained until after the characters become panicked. This retroactively gives the characters’ reaction a little more plausibility, as people might rightly be unnerved by a loud sound coming from an unexpected location. But there’s nothing about the framing of the shots, the sound design, or the characters’ initial reactions that makes it clear the sound is not coming from the front door (an alternate point, helpfully provided by fellow Loose Canon Reuben Clay, noted that it isn’t typical for a dangerous presence to announce itself by knocking anyway). Basically, I assumed that the loud knocking was the two missing characters returning in a hurry, and it seemed unbelievable to me that the other characters would immediately jump to a different conclusion. This incongruity could have been fixed in the script, but I also believe there is a way the film could have been composed and edited that would make their reaction more plausible, and the situation far more tense as a result.
Another obvious way Byrkit could have succeeded in generating tension, but fails to, is in the narrowing of point-of-view. The film eventually chooses the character Em as its protagonist, but it takes at least two-thirds of the film to make that choice clear. Before that the film pitches itself as an ensemble piece, albeit with certain characters privileged over others. This is a mistake, because it gives the script too much leeway to show only what it wants to show, and withhold exactly what it wants to withhold. Sometimes characters leave the house and we don’t follow them out, instead staying with the characters who stay behind. If the film had only one protagonist this strategy would make sense, as we could stay with her for the film’s entire run time and the increasing paranoia and distrust could emanate naturally out of her fear of the people around her. The better entries in the Invasion of the Body Snatchers series accomplish this feat. But Em is never given that role, as the film continues to waffle about where its point-of-view lies up until the last few minutes. There are many scenes that she is not in, and conversations occur that she could not be privy to (including one particularly egregious scene when the film shows two characters who are not from the original house conversing among themselves about the fact that they are in the wrong house, completely expanding the film's point-of-view to potentially include any characters from any house). This gives the film’s construction an even stronger sense of being arbitrary. Why don’t we see what happens to those characters when they leave? Why do we see what happens to other characters when they leave? Why do we hear this conversation? Why not other conversations? There is an answer, of course, but that answer is always the same: the film would fall apart if it were any other way. This is James Ward Byrkit’s first film, and his artistic immaturity shows through in almost every facet of this film’s construction. The narrative conceit, and the mystery surrounding it, pushes all other concerns to the rear. But without those other necessary pieces the film never alleviates the notion that the mystery means nothing. Like Lost and other recent high concept science fictions, the concept is all there is. It has nothing more interesting to say about real human behavior than those terrible twist-oriented episodes of The Outer Limits that I used to love in the early 1990s.
-Basil Swartzfager, 2014
