Directed By: James Ward Byrkit
Written by: James Ward Byrkit
Starring: Emily Baldoni, Maury Sterling, Nicholas Brendon
1 hour, 29 minutes
Amazon Link: https://amzn.to/2WiqF10
There’s a comet in the sky, and the newspeople have been saying things will break. Em’s phone cracks on her way to the party. Beth explains that she’s brought horse tranquilizer, and anyone who wants to try it is free to enjoy. It’s a strange dinner party, even if nothing had happened. Nobody at the party has any cell service; they all blame the comet.
Emily tells a story about a comet in 1923 that made people in Finland completely crazy. There’s a lot of chit-chat at the dinner table as we get to know the characters. Other people’s phones have shattered. One guy, Hugh, has a brother who works in theoretical physics, and he wants to be phoned if weird stuff starts to happen, but they can’t call him because all the phones are broken and there’s no Internet. Then the power goes out. There’s a whole bunch of people talking over each other for about sixteen hours.
When the power comes back on, Hugh goes to a neighbor’s house and finds a locked metal box. Inside the box are pictures of all the guests with numbers written on the back. There’s some indication that Hugh may have walked in a circle and was outside their own door. There’s a knock at the door, and they find a note taped to it. It’s the exact same note that High was still writing at the table. It seems to be some kind of time distortion.
What do the numbers on the back of each photo mean?
A group of four of them, carrying blue glow sticks, go in search of a neighbor’s house, but encounter an identical group of four people carrying red glow sticks. Hugh explains the theory of Schrodinger’s Cat and mentions a theory where both realities could be true at the same time. They theorize that there are two realities that are crossing over until the comet goes away. There’s a lot of discussion about going “over there” and killing their alternates. One guy even comes up with the brilliant plan of blackmailing himself. Then the power goes off again, and it all becomes a big game of who is real and who’s an alternate. How many realities are there, and does it really matter?
Commentary
Thirteen minutes in, after thirteen minutes of boring dinner conversation, I started checking the clock. A great deal of the dialogue is ad-libbed, as the actors didn’t have scripts. They were just given a short paragraph of goals they had for each scene, so they all seemed to want to talk over each other through most of the film.
There’s eight people at the party, and every time there’s a knock on the door, they all act terrified, even before things start getting complicated. There are no werewolves or psycho murderers out there, these people seem scared to death of their own neighbors. Must be California.
Eventually, it becomes somewhat clear what’s going on, and it does get interesting, but it took a lot of meandering dinner conversation alternating with a lot of shouting to get there.
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