#MOVIES LIKE COHERENCE CRACKED#

See, the night of the dinner party is also the night that a rare comet is passing overhead.

#MOVIES LIKE COHERENCE CRACKED#

Emily is our protagonist it’s through her eyes, mostly, that we see this drama play out, from the moment she arrives at the dinner party with a cracked phone until she wakes up the next morning. There’s an older married couple, New Age Beth and quasi-scientist Hugh (Elizabeth Gracen and Hugo Armstrong) there’s the asshole, Amir (Alex Manugian) and his new girlfriend Laurie (Lauren Maher) and there’s Emily (Emily Baldoni) and her boyfriend Kevin (Maury Sterling), who - it turns out - used to date Laurie in the not-so-distant past. The premise, as I laid out above, is cliche: eight thirty-somethings gather for a dinner party in the home of underworked actor Mike (Nicholas Brendon, of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame) and his Skype executive wife Lee (Lorene Scafaria). I just don’t know where to start with this film. It’s all of them at once, while also being genuinely frightening and startlingly clever and all within a tight hour and a half and with a cast of relative unknowns and with only an improvised script and with a microbudget of $50,000.

Hardly original stuff.īut something sets Coherence apart. The 2013 film from writer-director James Ward Byrkit isn’t a standard horror film, nor is it a standard thriller it doesn’t quite fit the mold of sci-fi or fantasy either. It’s what underpins everything from House on Haunted Hill and The Shining to episodes of The X-Files and the murder mystery send-up Clue. As the suspense and tension mounts, decisions are made, lives are upended, and our darkest fears become reality. gather for dinner/games night/vacation/etc and over the course of the night/weekend/winter/etc, some outside force beyond their ken terrorizes them. It’s a classic horror movie trope: a group of friends/family members/co-workers/etc.

Movies like coherence