Few movies manage to be intimate and personal, while also otherworldly and bizarre. Your exposure to this group of friends is brief, but you learn quite a lot about them-- Not only their backstories and relationships, but (and especially) their ways of thinking and acting. In writing, you are often told to do more with less. "Never use a long word when a short one will do", the modern reach of the minimalist philosophy, cut anything unnecessary. In film that is so often not the case, but Coherence attempts it, by filming the entire movie in the director's home, by making each character familiar enough to need little introduction (How many of us know somebody with Beth's west-coast neo-mysticism? With Mike's good intentions, but shaky judgement?), by introducing subplots we're all so familiar with that the sparse minutes devoted to them can give us great complexity. The film's plot isn't innately comprehensible, and it seems at times to break its own rules, but it doesn't hurt this film. The improvised dialogue is intensely believable, and in all but the moment's-notice camera shots, the traces of the movie's non-existent budget are invisible to you and I. And perhaps the budget of the film is possible because of that essential minimalism, that "less is more" that film has rarely been able to embrace without losing its accessibility.