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?

Oxide Pang -- one-half the Pang Brothers -- directs THE TESSERACT, a stylish, hyper-kinetic tale of good folks gone bad -- kinda/sorta -- in this kinda/sorta good-to-great film thriller.

By utilizing flashbacks, flashforwards, and ... erm ... flash-sidles (if there can be such a thing), Oxide Pangs crafts his film together more as an experiment in narrative voice, but he pretty much confides in this technique for the involved set-up of these four disparate folks: a drug dealer trying to score a big delivery; a comely psychologist trying to come to terms with the death of her young son; a professional assassin (can you ever have just one?!?!); and a thirteen-year-old thief who misunderstands the concepts of right and wrong. These four folks all converge on a hotel where their lives criss and cross as dramatically staged flybys and near-misses ... but, come the conclusion of the film, they collide with devastating results.

In a style very reminiscent of their earlier work, BANGKOK DANGEROUS, half-a-Pang flashes quick visuals with unusual camera angles almost universally throughout TESSERACT. However, some of the visuals pull the viewer away from the story a bit much, so the effectiveness of the technique -- perhaps a further study in it so far as Oxide is concerned -- is arguably debatable ... but the film's atmosphere is not. You can almost smell the decay when you're drenched with the seedier parts of the city, finding yourself quite possibly as repulsed as you are captivated by the events. Think of Oxide Pang's work as very Spielbergian in terms of tone and lighting, but with healthy parts of Scorsese thrown in to propel the narration.

Well-paced except for a few awkward moments early one where technique clearly outdistances the story, this slick glossy still makes for quality & interesting viewing ... but, as for shelf life, it might have a short life except for fans of the Pang Brothers and/or experimental films.

Firstly, the film is as much about the characters as the plot, and that is always hard for U.S. movie goers to handle. But, if you can just get your head out of the television this film is well worth the viewing. The plot is simple, but the characters make it more complicated, because the characters are complicated. The central theme is desperation, each individuals desperation and how it plays out when fate brings together a series of events. In this case criminal activity. Again, the crime isn't so much the point of this film (although crime is always a fine cinematic filter for human interaction), it's how these various people, with all there personal demons and angels that they carry around interact with the crime.

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.

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.