Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Coherence
2014 · James Ward Byrkit · Coherence on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice how often the camera arrives late to a speaker. (camera)
Nic Sadler and Byrkit shoot handheld, reframing to catch someone already mid-sentence, hunting focus, shooting faces past other people's shoulders. Whole exchanges happen in the kitchen with nobody covering them.
Payoff: The camera works under the same limits as the guests. You will miss things, and the missing is the design. In the reading: dicisign. The reading calls this a dicisign: a shot where the camera's own act of looking gets into the picture.
Listen for how much of the dinner talk overlaps. (sound)
The dialogue is improvised and captured in the room: cutlery, wine glasses, three conversations running at once. Half of what matters gets said underneath somebody else's sentence.
Payoff: You have to fish the meaning out of the noise, and the film never stops to repeat itself for you.
Watch how much each guest is holding back. (performance)
Byrkit handed the actors index cards each night with private aims and facts they were forbidden to share. Nobody at that table knew what anyone else had been told. The wariness is not performed.
Payoff: These people are managing more than they say, because the actors playing them genuinely were.
Notice the warm lamps indoors against the black outside. (light)
The house is lit by its own lamps, candles and flashlights. Outdoors is close to nothing at all.
Payoff: You start reading the film by light temperature as much as by anything anyone says.
Watch which room each person moves to. (staging)
Byrkit treats the floor plan dramatically. The living room holds the group, the kitchen holds the conspiring pair, the front door is a threshold with rules, the bathroom is where people reckon privately.
Payoff: Alliances announce themselves architecturally. You watch a faction form before anybody says a word about it.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the doors and the rooms. This group re-forms by moving around the house before anyone announces anything.