Coherence

(James Ward Bykrit, US, 2013)

Clever, shoestring sci-fi that skates by on the strength of its central idea.  It's major flaw is that it's stuck between the genuinely earned seriousness of Primer (which was another low, low budget film fueled by an ambitious concept) and something much more eagerly campy.  So it winds up feeling a little half-baked, and your admiration is tickled more for the effort and ingenuity of the production than for the ideas themselves.  And yet: it's handsomely crafted, with the major credit going to the company of actors, all of whom make hay with the spooky space-time shenanigans.  The ending feels unintentionally incoherent, but I wasn't tempted to try to put together the pieces.  This isn't the kind of film that's going to generate a cottage industry of explanatory texts and graphs, the way that Primer did.  But it is fun.