Coherence

Tanay Chaudhari

A psychedelic, sci-fi, suspense-drama based around the strange events happening as a mysterious comet passes Earth almost qualifies as a natural choice for this ‘Friday, the 13th.’

It surely sounded simple enough, especially with the backdrop of what started as a pleasant dinner-night amongst a group of friends, twisting into intersecting parallel realities (a.k.a. “coherence” in Quantum Physics), with people losing their ‘coherent’ selves as they walked panic-stricken between those countless universes, each time encountering an unoriginal version of themselves – albeit with not as passive intentions as themselves.

By the moment we step into its ACT II amidst getting hold of that literal ‘identity-crisis’, that unsettling feeling crept into bafflement. Their maddening out-of-place altering accounts pushed the troubled characters and viewers alike while skeptically attempting to keep tabs with notes and paraphernalia about which “reality” they exist in especially when dark-secrets of their pasts are unceremoniously revealed. Nothing stayed the same in that astronomical anomaly, and the long wait for that ominous comet and the night to pass continued. However, quite unsurprisingly when the morning arrived, it was hardly a relief to some.

Earlier popularised in an episode of the sitcom “The Big Bang Theory” – the paradoxical thought-experiment “Schoredinger’s Cat” proposed that “a cat trapped within a box with a vile of poison could both be dead and alive, until the box is opened to discover one of the results. Just as in Maths, the possibility of all probabilities co-existing till an event occurs and a result is found.
Based on such mind-boggling Physical theories it certainly came as a surprise from the writer of the Oscar-winning animated-comedy feature “Rango” – James Ward Byrkit. Though, thankfully the creepiness of such a theme doesn’t come along with gore, but instead through a fairly engaging character-based multi-narrative.

It was a bit of a lag to be over-indulgent in sub-plots, nevertheless, the film’s a solid-catch for those hungry, non-mainstream cinema viewers looking out for a unique plot, and what better than an appreciable attempt to make that innocuous seeming theory into a freaking account of multiple-realities.

Director: James Ward Byrkit

Writer: James Ward Byrkit

An Engineering Graduate and a Management Professional, Tanay Chaudhari became an “admirer of celluloid” much earlier in life. Starting a decade back, the picking up of film-making variants gradually gravitated into a sincere interest of writing reviews on parallel and popular cinema. His film reviews are regularly being published for past five years in print as well as on popular websites, earning him a recognition as a writer and even an award.