Coherence

I love little independent movies like this. It was made in five days in the director’s living and dining room, on a budget that added up to about a large bag of Cheetos and a case of Dr. Pepper. There were more actors (eight of them) than crew. And they made it up as they went along. That can be disastrous, but it worked very well here. And it tackles a subject as arcane as the real-world implications of the thought experiment known as Schrödinger’s cat. Don’t look for an explanation of that idea here, it’s way too complicated, and I’d probably screw it up, anyway. It’s a quantum physics metaphor, such that it seems possible that a cat in a box can be both alive and dead at the same time, and only resolves into either/or when the box is opened and observed. This is also referred to as the “collapse of the wave function.”

Anyway, the idea explored here is that two realities can co-exist side by side, and if that is so … which one is the real reality? A power outage hits while four yuppie couples are having a dinner party. When the lights come back on, they go outside and see that although almost all of the neighborhood is still dark, there is one lighted house down the street. They begin exploring the situation, and find that the people in the other house are themselves. So, are these people a threat to them? Maybe they are the imitation, and those folks are the real people.

As you might imagine, the possibilities quickly become mind-boggling as different iterations of the same folks come and go. Is that woman over there really the wife I came in with, or is she one of the duplicates. And if so, is she a danger to me. I can’t say I was 100% satisfied with the ending … but in a way, that’s the point. A hard-and-fast resolution of the story would destroy the fundamental uncertainty of it all. I thought all the actors were first-rate, certainly drawn from that vast well of talent in Los Angeles, people who are scrambling and might one day become the next Matt Damon or Scarlett Johansson … but probably won’t. It’s a harsh world.