The Tesseract

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")

At the beginning of the film one can read:

"The Tesseract is a hypercube unraveled." "When a square unravels to a live, two dimensions become one." "When a cube unravels to a cross, three dimensions become two." "When a hypercube unravels to the tesseract, four dimensions become three."

In fact the tesseract is a 4 dimensional cube (term by Charles Howard Hinton, mathematician and science fiction writer) and this concept tries to introduce us into more than three dimensions.

This movie is a strange mixture of Matrix (special effects), Kill Bill (slow camera scenes with Tomoyasu Hotei's "Battle Without Honor or Humanity" style) and Memento (playing with time, backward and forward).

Four strange and different characters reunited in a hotel of Bangkok with nothing in common. Really nothing in common? The first minutes promise an excellent film that does not convince in any moment. It's a pity, could have been magnificent.

The book, The Tesseract, is written by Alex Garden (who wrote the incredibly book The Beach, and the screenplay to 28 days later). Although the novel was no where near the level of The Beach, it was still an interesting and gripping book. This film, on the other hand, is w*nk. It cuts out half of the story line, has horrible shots, transitions and effects throughout the whole thing, makes no sense, is extremely disjointed, and has the most wooden acting I've seen since... well probably ever. I am annoyed that I spent good money renting this out, that could've been spent on more beer. If you are tempted to watch this, think twice, put your blockbuster card down, pick your library card up. Trust.

PS. By the way for all the people that say my review wasn't helpful, grow up and learn to read

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.

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?