The Tesseract

Oxide Pang's adaptation of Alex Garland's novel, The Tesseract, employs every visual trick in the book to disguise the lack of strong narrative. However, the glossy veneer soon wears thin, revealing a rather dull story which ultimately fails to impress.

Jonathan Rhys-Meyers plays a desperate drug runner embroiled in a deal that goes wrong, when his consignment mysteriously goes missing. The tale is told in a non-linear fashion that at first confuses but eventually becomes clearer to those viewers that stay the distance. The problem is that director Pang leaves it too late in the day to start filling in the blanks, by which time all but the most patient will have given up watching.

The film does get marginally better towards the end – but is it really worth the wait?

This film is about a group of tourists getting involved in each other's lives in a sleazy and dodgy Bangkok hotel.

This film is told in a non linear way. It has intersecting plots involving several characters, and these are all executed and mixed together seamlessly. The characters are developed very well, and the viewers can relate to them easily.

The plot is excellent, full of suspense and thrill. It shows that how one little action of a person can have profound effect on another person! It kept on the edge throughout the movie! The cinematography is also excellent.

Another film that has intersecting plots mixed together in a non linear way is the Oscar wining Crash. I think, this film is in many ways equally good, if not superior to Crash. It is a great pity that this film does not have wider recognition than it currently has.

I'll have to admit, I was pretty much confused by this film. All the flashbacks and flash forwards had me reeling. Nevertheless, I was fascinated at the same time. It isn't quite the same story as the Alex Garland novel. To begin with, it's set in Bangkok, rather than Manila. I've seen "Bangkok Dangerous," which is a film by some of the same crew, and I think this is the better film. However, there are some incongruous elements. For instance, the boy "Wit" seems to have wandered in from another movie. He reminds me of one of those mischievous Third World sidekicks from one of the later Elvis films (fans of Rhys Meyers may appreciate the irony here). He can't really act, and he's obviously not Thai, but he's a winning presence nonetheless. The opening scene in the hotel room reminded me of "The Matrix," with its slow motion bullets. Later scenes were out of the "Reservoir Dogs" factory. Sandwiched in between were a couple of interesting stories, especially the one involving Saskia Reeves, as the psychologist who had lost her child. I also liked Jonathan Rhys Meyers, whose character is a mass of contradictions but who seems to grow as an actor with each film. See it for the film it could have been, but enjoy it for the experiment it is.

In Bangkok, in a low-budget hotel called "Heaven", the fate of four guests are interconnected due to a theft in a room: Sean (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), a paranoid English drug dealer, that is dealing with a powerful local drug lord; the also British psychologist Rosa (Saskia Reeves), who is grieving the loss of her son and making a research with poor children in Thailand; a seriously wounded killer, hired to kill the mobster; and Wit (Alexander Rendel), a thirteen years old abused bellboy, that steals the guests. In the end, we see that it is almost impossible to control life, and sometimes, a subtle incident may lead to fatality.

I did not find the word "Tesseract" in Webster or American Heritage Dictionary, but in internet, I found that it would be a 4-dimensional cube. The explanation of this word is also provided in the introduction of the movie. Using this concept with four characters in a hotel, reducing to three and converging to one, the screenplay writer wrote a very original and intriguing story, apparently based on a book, confused in the first twenty minutes since it is non-linear, but attractive when the viewer understands the plot. I believe that watching for the second time, this film would be better and better, and that is my intention in a near future. I liked the idea of how difficult would be to control our destiny, which is connected and affected by the actions of other people. Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Alexander Rendel and Saskia Reeves give great performances. I really recommend this movie to audiences that like a dark and different story. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "No Limite da Realidade" ("In the Limit of Reality")

I thought this movie was a nice experiment. I liked the photography and the combination of B&W and colour in one shot, which makes the colour functional. I also loved the time-shifts and repetitions of shots from other angles. It gives the film its own identity. The general atmosphere of Bangkok as a setting seems quite successful to me. Saskia Reeves as Rosa and Alexander Rendel as Wit are very convincing, more than Jonathan Rhys-Meyers as Sean, who, I thought, has a tendency of over-acting. Of course paranoia is a most difficult role-aspect to act out. The initial scene, where Sean has a dream in which he's shot at, is too much a technical copy of typical Matrix-scenes. Even the sound effects seem to be an exact clone.