What happens when you mix Dogme 95 filmmaking with a Twilight Zone story?  Something along the lines of Coherence—a sci-fi improvisational experiment. Shot in only five nights with a minimal crew, the results don’t pack an emotional wallop or incite the self-reflection they are meant to.

Eight friends gather for a dinner party on the night of an unusual astronomical incident. What starts as a warm get-together devolves into conflict as strange reality-bending events occur. Namely, they discover they’re stuck in an alternate universe with their own doppelgängers.

The film strives for both intimacy and a sense of grandeur by making the primary setting a dinner party under an existential premise. Perhaps the film would’ve worked if the sense of affection and the relationships among the characters were developed further in the writing. Instead, filmmaker James Ward Byrkit leaves it to the actors to improvise, and while that may make the characters’ decisions more surprising, they also feel more superficial and of the moment. For instance, all of the characters understandably flip out when they hear their doubles exist. However, that’s pretty much all they do. One character reasons that he should kill his double and that’s about the extent of it. A few want to see their double but nobody interacts with them or has any bright ideas.

We’re never really sure who is best friends with whom, where there is an undercurrent of tension or jealousy, or who has loyalty to another. Instead, the cast spends the majority of the time bickering among themselves over how they should approach their doubles, but there’s no weight to it.  Perhaps the director was aiming to express Sartre’s dictum of hell being other people, but the interactions among the characters and the decisions they make are too easy.