By David Dent
Anyone who has seen Graham Hughes’s last feature, Death of a Vlogger, will attest to the director’s skill in deflecting audience awareness of working with a low budget by throwing lots of great ideas at us instead.
And now Hughes is back doing exactly the same thing, although this time his topic is the multiverse, an increasingly au courant theme in fantastic filmmaking.
Footage of the disappearance of a graffiti artist, Emily (Josie Rogers), via a propped-up door in the middle of an abandoned building, comes to the attention of filmmakers Sam (Annabel Logan) and Ash (Joma West). Sam’s previous documentary, ‘Bear Market’, dealing with the capitalist treatment of the teddy bear business, had not been a success (“You do not know existential pain unless you’ve produced a film,” says the film-maker). The disappearance of Emily, however, piques her interest, and after a brief chat with the weird guy who filmed the Emily footage, Brian (Stephen Beavis), before long Sam has ‘borrowed’ the door and installed it in the living room of her apartment with a view to constructing a new doc.
Aided by Dr. Innis (Paddy Kondracki), whose scientific mind is alive to this sort of thing, Sam and Ash begin to experiment by filming voyages through the door, which turn out to be varied and surprising (such as a trip to a Giant Panda theme park complete with tentacled bear, and a strange world featuring pyramids and floating whales). But when a heavily bedraggled Emily emerges, pursued by a different Brian (Hughes), things start to get very weird indeed.Whereas in his last film Hughes front and centred himself as the haunted vlogger, here the film is carried by Logan, a likeable actor (who was also in DoaV) whose interest and ambition nearly get the better of her. Hughes wisely keeps things buzzing (the multiverse idea, if edited effectively as is the case here, is a gift for those movie makers with slender budgets) and cleverly builds his action to an exciting climax. Hostile Dimensions might be a bit of smoke and mirrors when you stand back and think about it, but it’s a fun way to spend an hour and a quarter nevertheless.
Hostile Dimensions screened as part of Frightfest 2023
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