50 Essential Sci-Fi Films of the 21st Century (So Far)

Despite having been with us for 12 years now, James Ward Byrkit’s micro-budget feature (seriously, this was made for $50k!) has still not enjoyed the airing it deserves, despite being widely regarded as an outstanding contribution to the science fiction genre.

The setup is simple: a group of eight friends (including Nicholas Brendon and Lorene Scafaria) attend a dinner party on the night of Miller's Comet, where they laugh, tease, flirt, and argue, before the power goes out. Everyone takes a coloured glowstick, and things immediately ratchet up a notch as they investigate one house on their block that still has its lights on. Inside this house is another group of eight revellers - or, the same group, but from another reality - and this is where the fun begins, as they discover more houses from other versions of reality, and their members converge and clash, losing their points of origin and sabotaging each other in a quest to be in the one remaining reality when the comet has gone.

Coherence takes a dinner table drama and transports it across dimensions, using the character flaws and quirks of everyone involved with the cosmic-level event to build a tense and unrelenting narrative, beginning to end. Byrkit’s script packs a punch in every scene, keeping us on our toes as the strangeness expands and the established rules go out the window. And it looks, sounds, and is acted like a production with, quite literally, 100x the budget.