The Most Mind-Bending Sci-Fi Movie of 2010s Was Made on a Shoestring Budget, With No Crew or Script

Science fiction is considered to be the domain of blockbusters, whose directors have huge budgets to create entire fictional worlds. But practice shows that it is possible to make a good sci-fi movie on a shoestring – just call your friends to play the main roles and film the alien flora in the nearest forest.

Director James Ward Byrkit was looking for work without any success. At that time, his resume included work as a concept artist in the first three installments of Pirates of the Caribbean. At some point, James realized that he wanted to make his own movie.

James Ward Byrkit Had a Budget of $50,000, Almost No Script and No Crew

This is how Byrkit came up with the idea of making a film without a crew or a script. Since he decided to film in his own home, he had to come up with a sci-fi concept that would take the location to a larger scale. And since his wife was eight months pregnant and wanted to give birth at home, she agreed to let him film in the house if he could shoot the movie in just five nights.

James invited eight people he knew to play the roles, but they did not have to know each other. He had to mentally separate them into groups and pairs, as if they were friends/lovers.

Byrkit gave each actor character traits, backstories and motivations. He wanted to get rid of the teamwork on stage where each actor just waits for his time to speak – James' goal was for the characters to listen to each other, participate in the conversation and experience real emotions.

For a mere $50,000, the director made a science fiction movie in the setting of his own home, with improvised dialogue and scenes invented by the actors instead of a detailed script. The result is one of the most impressive and stunning sci-fi films of recent years.

What is Coherence About?

The plot of Coherence is about eight friends who gather for a dinner party at the house of one of them. Just at that moment, a mysterious comet flies across the sky, inexplicably bending the space-time continuum.

The whole movie is one big puzzle in which the characters figure out what is going on in different ways: while some simply try not to get lost in this time-space labyrinth, others use the confusion with timelines to solve personal problems.

But even though the whole movie is a big puzzle, the viewer (almost) doesn't have to rack their brains: the tricky cinematic riddle is solved in the finale. Everything strange suddenly becomes absolutely logical, and the temporal knot is effectively untied. You can only marvel at how cleverly the director has tricked you with his cinematic trick.

Where to Stream Coherence?

Coherence is available to watch on Prime Video.