by Garrett Smith, Contributor

Welcome to BIG IDEAS, SMALL BUDGETS, in which I will be examining movies that take big swings with shallow pockets. Everyone knows Robert Rodriguez made El Mariachi for $7,000, which is indeed an impressively small price tag for a legitimately exciting action movie. But if you told me you could make a movie about a musician that gets mistaken for a hitman for $7,000, I would believe you. I would, however, be less inclined to believe you could make a movie about a vampire lair that gets mistaken for a bar for that much money, just as a random example (From Dusk till Dawn cost $19 million). This column will focus on movies that I consider to have “big ideas” at their core and feel even larger when you consider how little money went into making them. I expect that most of the movies I cover will be genre movies, if not specifically science-fiction movies, and that I will be spoiling them in great detail.

We will begin with what I consider to be the primo example of my premise:

Coherence (dir. James Ward Byrkit, 2013).

Say, what’s the big idea?

A group of old friends have a dinner party on the night a comet passes by Earth, which has the strange side effect of allowing people to cross from one dimension into another. Even as the movie opens up and investigates this premise, it initially seems as though we are dealing with doppelgängers - our group of heroes discover another house just like the one they’re in, filled with an identical group of people. But as the movie continues to unfold, it becomes clear that there’s an infinite multiverse, and a doorway has opened between all of them at once, allowing multiple versions of a person to occupy the same reality at the same time.

And they did that with how much money?

$50,000

Well how’d they pull that off?

One could argue the movie is didactic in its exposition about Schrödinger's cat and mythology about the strange circumstances surrounding the comet. The script does go out of its way to make sure the audience understands that the comet is causing some sort of disruption to the fabric of our reality, and that matter is in a state of flux until observed. But in doing so, it sets the table perfectly for some of the smartest, low-cost plotting I’ve ever seen - the characters eventually realize they need a way to “mark” themselves so they don’t lose track of who is from what reality. They do so by locking random objects like ping pong paddles and napkins into a box, as well as photographs of themselves that they use dice to randomly generate numbers they can write on said pictures. They even carefully choose a pen color to write with, essentially ensuring they've got a multi-factor authentication for their group. They also have blue glow sticks that they carry with them throughout the movie as they make their way to and from a “dark zone” in the middle of their neighborhood.

Eventually we meet a group of the same characters that have red glow sticks, indicating that while the same events are occurring in an overlapping reality, they are slightly different. This leads to the discovery that some of the characters we thought were from our blue group have actually been from the red group, and it’s unclear how or when this happened. In time we are shown yellow and green groups as well, and they’ve had their own chaotic nights of leaving and returning to the house, which it turns out may be a different house every time someone returns to it. The ultimate reveal is that there’s an infinite number of realities that have combined in an infinite number of ways throughout the night, and the only thing our characters have to do is decide which reality they really want to live in (and what they may have to sacrifice in order to do so).

Did it work?

Remarkably, with only one location and some glow sticks, pens, photographs, and lock-boxes, the production team successfully builds infinite realities that I not only believe in, but can identify. This occasionally requires some crafty filmmaking and editing, like body doubles and shot-reverse-shots of the same actor, but absolutely zero special effects.

Was it successful?

With an 88% on Rotten Tomatoes and domestic gross of $100,000, Coherence was well-liked and relatively successful. According to Box Office Mojo, it’s widest release was in only 7 theaters, so it’s no surprise that it didn’t do huge numbers and isn’t necessarily widely popular, but I think it’s safe to say this low-budget gamble paid off.

Why should I watch it?

The premise of the movie itself should tickle your brain in all the right ways if you’re a curious individual, or even if you just like a good “mind-bending” movie. But what really tickles my brain about the movie is trying to understand how they even pulled it off. When you really consider the premise and how huge and expansive it is, it’s unbelievable that you’re not discussing a mega-budget blockbuster made by a major studio. Let alone that what you’re actually discussing is a semi-improvised indie feature made in a filmmakers own home (I met Nicholas Brendon, one of the film’s stars, at a comic convention once and he revealed the note about it being mostly improvised, which seems impossible given all the minutiae of who is from what reality that is peppered throughout the film - though I understand there was much pre-production planning that allowed for a structured kind of improv). This is the kind of science-fiction that I gravitate towards most, in that it’s mostly pretty hard sci-fi with just the right amount of fantastical, philosophical underpinning to feel like a relevant metaphor by the end. As far as big ideas on small budgets go, the canyon doesn’t get any wider, nor are the results ever more successful than with Coherence.