Eight friends gather for a dinner party on the night a comet is supposed to pass close to Earth. For not especially clear reasons, some of the group are concerned that this celestial visitation may have unusual side effects, like another (also made up for the film) comet did in 1923. Though to be fair, one of the stories they created for this earlier incident is nicely creepy.
So when the lights go out at every house except one a few blocks away, the group is perhaps more prone to panic than they ought to be. Lacking a land line and thus any way to contact the outside world (I guess in the film's reality cell towers don't have the batteries and generators and that generally continue to operate in a power cut in ours), two of the group head out to the lit up house, hoping they will have a land line there.
Those left in the house freak out when someone knocks at the door (why? Panic prone, I guess), but then settle a bit when their two friends return, carrying a box. Inside? A table tennis racket and photos of the entire group. The night is about to get very, very strange, in a quantum physics kind of way.
I was tempted to give Coherence a qualified recommendation because I have a soft spot for SF films that are trying to do something interesting with actual scientific concepts, and the ending isn't a bad one. But in the end I can't quite do it. The behaviour of the characters earlier in the film feels implausibly panicky, contrived for the needs of the plot, and the momentum of the movie sags quite a lot in the middle.
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