Most Coherence Audiences Probably Missed This Door To Nowhere Clue
Spoilers ahead for "Coherence."
There are movies often cited as being confusing or mind-melting, like "Inception" or "Memento," which really aren't that complicated. Then there's something like "Primer," which requires detailed diagrams and hours-long YouTube explainers to begin to unravel its web of twists and turns. Sitting happily in the middle is James Ward Byrkit's "Coherence," one of the best sci-fi films of the past decade and a movie that is complex and mild-melting yet not so complex that it's hard to follow.
The film begins with an alluring premise of four couples meeting at a friend's house for dinner on the night a comet is passing by the Earth. While they all have messy relationships to navigate (some of the guests have had affairs, there's a couple of ex-girlfriends present), the comet causes quantum decoherence, creating split realities and allowing the guests' alternate selves to intrude into their reality, and vice-versa. It's a concept that allows for plenty of twists while also allowing for simplicity, which was the impetus for the existence of "Coherence."
The film does offer plenty of clues and foreshadowing to tease its eventual surprises, like how we learn early on about a case in Finland where a woman said she saw her husband's double after a comet passed by Earth. And then there's the door to nowhere concept. Speaking with Yahoo around the time of the film's release in 2014, Byrkit explained that viewers should play close attention to the door in their repeated viewings of the film:
"The door to nowhere is used several times; [Emily] comes in and out of it, or she comes in through it at the end. It's also the door that Hugh and Amir escape out of when they take the box."
Don't trust those who cross the door to nowhere in Coherence
We learn about the door to nowhere concept early in the film from Elizabeth Gracen's character, Beth, who says it was part of Feng shui and a vortex of bad energy. If you look closely throughout the film, the door — which, as the name implies, doesn't really go anywhere — is used by several characters who should definitely not be in the house.
As Byrkit explained it, when the characters Hugh (Hugo Armstrong) and Amir (Alex Manugian) leave the house and take the box with them, they leave through that door to nowhere and "they put an oven mitt in [the box]," that's because, as we learn towards the end of the film, this is the oven mitt house, which the characters Emily (Emily Foxler), Kevin (Maury Sterling), and Laurie (Lauren Maher) don't realize. "If they would have just looked at the table and said, 'Why is there an oven mitt here instead of a ping pong paddle?,' it would have gone very differently, but they didn't," Byrkit noted. "They didn't notice, and the actors didn't either.'"
Throughout the film, we learn that there are "good" and "bad" versions of the characters, and those who enter through the door to nowhere are all bad — making this a great hint of what is going on. When we hear Hugh pounding on the door, it's our first hint that he is not who he seems. Likewise, our Emily uses that door at the end of the film to kill her doppelganger and steal her spot in a different reality. Beth was right, and whoever is near the door has bad energy and is someone with unresolved issues.
Before the surprise sequel to "Coherence" arrives, you should rewatch the original movie with this in mind.