This Sci-Fi Movie Starring A Buffy Actor Was Made For $50K And Is Universally Acclaimed

One-dinner movies have been sporadically shifting in and out of cinemas (and public consciousness) since they're relatively cheap and easy to produce yet damn hard to get right. Their core principle: a single setting (not unlike Netflix's sci-fi with a Squid Game-esque premise) with a set number of characters amicably interacting within a confined space until something unexpected happens and things go irreversibly awry. These films more often than not are dark comedies like Thomas Vinterberg's classic dogma film "The Celebration," Roman Polanski's "Carnage," or the remarkably hard-hitting Italian masterpiece, "Perfect Strangers."

But every once in a while, there comes an outlier like Karyn Kusama's psychological horror, "The Invitation," or James Ward Byrkit's 2013 sci-fi, "Coherence," starring an ensemble cast, including the late Nicholas Brendon of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" fame. It speaks to Byrkit's uncanny conceptual vision that he made this film practically without a script, in his own living room, with an improvisational cast who've only been given note cards as to what their characters should be and how they'd react to the trippy inciting incident the narrative essentially revolves around.

The core idea of the "plot" is that eight friends attend a dinner party on the night a comet passes Earth, the power goes out, and strange things begin to occur. So strange that the group gradually suspect that the passing of the comet created at least one mirror reality, which they can see is taking place in the only house in the neighborhood that somehow still has the lights on. When two of them go over to investigate and use the phone (their cells have no signal), they realize there's another dinner party happening with an alternate version of themselves — and who knows how many more there are.

"Coherence" is definitely a trip down a rabbit hole of fascinating theories and constantly changing multiverses in which personal dramas unfold in various scenarios. Although its cast doesn't boast the biggest names (besides Brendon, there's Elizabeth Gracen, Emily Baldoni, and Maury Sterling), the concept itself is so intriguing and multi-layered that you find yourself deeply invested in their perception of multiple realities anyway.

Byrkit and Co. really proves that you don't need millions of dollars, breathtaking visual effects, and the crème de la crème of Hollywood actors to make a thought-provoking and boundary-pushing sci-fi that almost demands multiple watches to figure out in its entirety. Made on a tiny budget of $50,000, "Coherence" garnered $139,000 at the box office during its limited theatrical run, but more importantly, it also quickly became a lauded critical favorite — currently standing at an 89% rating on Rotten Tomatoes — and a cult classic among viewers through word of mouth.

It's not that nobody produces these kinds of highly ambitious and clever little indie films from time to time; it's more that they never manage to become popular and well-known among a wider audience. Byrkit's feature managed to accomplish that with virtually no marketing, which is an achievement in and of itself. Frankly, "Coherence" is the rare and smart filmmaking that deserves it. If you're a fan of mumblecore and inventive sci-fi flicks in general, consider yourself invited to this peculiar, somewhat bizarre, and immensely mind-bending dinner party — it'll be a hoot.