The concept of the multiverse has been deeply explored in film and television more in the last ten years than ever before. Some prominent examples include: What If...?, Spider-Man: No Way Home, the Spider-Verse film series, Rick and Morty, Community, Everything Everywhere All At Once, and many, many more.
While there were a few films before 2010 that slightly dealt with alternate realities — like Coraline or Mr. Nobody — the 2013 indie film Coherence dove into the concept with an actual scientific explanation of the concept. Although the theory of a multiverse can be traced back all the way to the nineteenth century, it isn't until recently that Hollywood has run with it in abundance.
One Show Discovered The Multiverse Years Ago (And Did It Better)
The multiverse construct may be new to Marvel, but it has been an integral part of The Flash since Season 2.
It's no wonder that a low-budget indie film beat Hollywood to the punch by years. Whether or not Coherence or other multiverse films started the recent cinematic trend is up for debate, but one thing is for certain. This movie resembles how the most popular multiverse movies operate now, and it should be watched by sci-fi fans everywhere.
What Is Coherence About?
Coherence | |
|---|---|
Director | James Ward Byrkit |
Writers | James Ward Byrkit, Alex Manugian |
Cast | Emily Baldoni, Maury Sterling, Nicholas Brendon, Elizabeth Gracen, Lorene Scafaria, Hugo Armstrong, Alex Manugian, Lauren Maher |
Release Date | September 19, 2013 |
Runtime | 89 minutes |
Budget | About $50,000 |
Box Office | $102,617 (US and Canada) |
RT Critic Score | 89% |
RT Audience Score | 81% |
Where to Watch | Prime |
Coherence follows a group of eight friends — Emily, Kevin, Mike, Lee, Beth, Hugh, Amir, and Laurie — as they gather for a dinner party. Among the friends are three couples: Emily and Kevin, Mike and Lee (the hosts), and Hugh and Beth. Amir had invited Laurie as his date, but the two aren't dating; however, Laurie and Kevin have a romantic history.
On this particular night, there's a comet passing through the sky called Miller's Comet, which hasn't passed Earth for over one hundred years. The comet causes weird things to start happening. It disables everyone's cell service, causes Emily and Hugh's phones to crack out of nowhere, and causes a neighborhood-wide power outage. However, the group ventures outside, carrying blue glowsticks, to see a house in the distance that still has its lights on.
Hugh and Amir go to investigate, to see if the people at the house can lend them their phone. While they're gone, a banging at Mike and Lee's side door scares everyone. When Hugh and Amir return, Hugh appears shaken. The group gets him to talk, and he reveals he looked in the other house's window to see the same dinner set up as they had at their house. No one believes him until he writes down a note to leave for the other house. Suddenly there's a knock at Mike and Lee's door and an identical note left taped to the door — before Hugh even walked out of the house.
Part of the group decides to venture out themselves, holding the blue glowsticks, so they don't lose each other. During their trip, they pass through a dark zone before reaching the other house, and an awestruck Mike says that the lit up house is identical to his. They rush back to their original house, but not before running into a group of people with red glowsticks. Upon a closer look, they see that it's actually themselves. Both groups sprint back to their own homes and inform the rest of the group of what they saw.
What is the Scientific Theory Coherence is Exploring?
It happens that Hugh's brother, Brian, is a teacher and an astrophysics enthusiast, and he sent Hugh a book with notes in it containing notes regarding "Decoherence and Schrödinger's Cat." Dr. Erwin Schrödinger is a real-life physicist who proposed the thought experiment known as Schrödinger's Cat. Hugh explains the theory to the group:
There's a cat in a box that has a fifty-fifty chance of living, because there's a vial of poison that's also in the box. So, regular physics would say that it's one or the other. That the cat is either alive or dead. But Brian would argue that quantum physics says that both realities exist simultaneously. It's only when you open the box that they collapse into a single event [...] There is another theory that two states continue to exist separate and decoherent from each other, each creating a new branch of reality based on the two outcomes. Quantum decoherence ensures that the different outcomes have no interaction with each other.
Basically, the observer — the person who opens the box — dictates reality. In their case, the comet is the observer, and they are all the cat inside. But based on the third theory that Brian proposes, if the box is never opened, then both realities will continue to exist. This perplexes the group, but more importantly, it terrifies them. If they were to take the theory literally, that would mean that one of the group of them would continue to live after the comet passed, and the other would die.
How Does Coherence End?
Throughout the film, everyone at some point leaves the house. Soon, they figure out that not everyone in the house is from their own original reality. What's more, there are far more than just two different realities in which their group came together that particular night.
The group starts to fight, but Emily sees that she isn't in her original house and chooses to leave. As she goes to all the other houses, she looks inside and sees their other selves either arguing, fighting, killing each other, or doing nothing at all. She comes upon one house where it appears that they haven't noticed this phenomenon is occurring. In Emily's reality, all night, she and Kevin have been fighting over their relationship. But in this one, she sees herself happy with Kevin.
Emily Prime decides to lure herself to her car, and kills her other self before taking her place and returning, with no one else the wiser as to who she truly is. As she walks in, though, she passes out. She doesn't wake until morning, after the comet is fully passed by. She thinks she's in the clear, and talks with Kevin. But Kevin receives a phone call from the Emily of his own timeline, whom Emily Prime failed to kill, and looks at the Emily standing in front of him in disbelief. On that gripping moment, the film ends.
Coherence was made before the multiverse was utilized abundantly in Hollywood projects. So, assuming these people in the film were a part of actual reality, they would be relatively unfamiliar with the concept of a multiverse. This creates a more impactful shock when they realize the situation they find themselves in. For them, as well as viewers at the time, the multiverse took a second for everyone to wrap their heads around. Still, sci-fi fans should revisit the film today. As it was among the first to do so, the method in which Coherence portrays the multiverse is very unique compared to how it's used in film and TV today.