A second viewing of "Coherence" has just blown my mind, and then subsequent reading has blown my mind even further [Spoilers after a certain point in my post, clearly marked]

Okay if you haven't seen Coherence (2013), I will let you know before I enter spoiler territory.

It's one of those films where the less you know, the better. Almost anything you could find out about it will be a spoiler.

All I will tell you is that it's about a group of friends who have a dinner party, while a comet is flying close to the earth. Things start to get real weird. That's all you should know.

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[SPOILERS AHEAD]

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Seriously if you haven't seen it, come back to this post after you have.

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Okay. I went kind of nuts compiling a whole bunch of stuff I found here.

So, on the rewatch, knowing from the get-go that basically any time anyone leaves the house they are no longer 'the original', it totally changes things. The first two people that leave and come back, we immediately know they are not the same people, but it takes them ages to figure it out (when they realise they have the red glowsticks, and they are in a blue glowstick house).

Each group that goes out and comes back, different versions.

What I am only now wondering, is: we (the camera POV) leave the house. The house we think of as The House is in fact, not The House the minute "we" step outside into "the black".

We only get the sense of how many houses there are right at the end, while we follow Emily in her quest to find a better house for her to insinuate herself into.

So do "we" follow any one character? The only original character, from our perspective, at the end of the film is Emily Prime. Did we follow her the entire time, or did we lose sight of her? Is she the only original left, and at the end of the film she made it into a happier version that didn't get all messed up (except for "final reality Emily" who she tried to kill)?

Wanting to talk about this feels a little Pepe DeSilva if I'm being honest... I really liked this film and would be curious to hear your take. Whoah and hold the phone I just found this diagram of houses and character movements!

And hey wow, a timeline.

There are of course other reddit threads on this.
This user fleshed out the IMDB trivia page!

Among the interesting tidbits which help explain why the film is so effective:

"The actors didn't know what was going on any more than we did! "Instead of scripts, the actors would each receive only a small paragraph (that only they would see) as their 'goals' for the day. This allowed for the story to unfold naturally and create genuine reactions in the other actors."

"When Kevin (Maury Sterling) tries to leave the house by himself, Em (Emily Baldoni) was given a note to not let him leave and his note was to leave."

"According to Emily Baldoni, after the first mysterious thumping on the "door to nowhere", the actors were both scared and very excited about the story that was unfolding. "Of course we knew we were in good hands, but this is when things got really exciting, because we could see how genius and well-planned everything was. We just didn't have any clue."

It was shot chronologically.

I think these facts created a huge opportunity for the actors to react to things more realistically, and bring us along for the ride in a really interesting way. What a cool way to make a film.

Other reddit discussions:
About the ending with a really interesting observation from /u/concord72 "I'm not sure if this is a plot hole or just another part of the plot, but the Laurie we meet in House #1 is not the same Laurie in House #2, even though we as the audience have been following her the whole time and there was never an opportunity for her to switch. Laurie during the dinner scene say's she doesn't have anything to do with yoga but then in House 2, when she is alone with Kevin, she reminds him of a past sexual encounter they shared and says something along the lines that she had to do yoga for a week afterwards. So even though she never leaves our sight, this is not the original Laurie."

Holy smokes /u/WowBaBao has an amazing observation from this thread.

They basically say that the weirdness of the comet starts right off the bat. People are arriving at the dinner party at different times, and "1) Everyone that arrives at the dinner party at different times are from their OWN different dimensions.

The dimensional shifting doesn't just start when the lights go out!! Holy smokes that changes things... and accounts for things - "We know this by the conversations throughout the movie. For example, Mike explains that he was an actor on the show, "Roswell" while Laurie, who says she, "loves the show" has never seen him on the show. Mike also comments about her yoga while Laurie denies it but then mentions doing yoga when she is speaking to Kevin in the hallway later on in the film."

Wow. Good observation! I had totally felt like something was off, with the discrepancies in some of those details, but couldn't quite place why.

Everyone arriving at the dinner party as it was getting started were not from the original reality.

!!

Okay I think I'm done. Time to /r/GoToBedHeidi

Submitted October 27, 2018 at 04:43PM by H_G_Bells https://ift.tt/2Ps9FkF