Hostile Dimensions, the newest film by Scottish writer-director Graham Hughes, isn’t all that good — and saying that feels pretty bad. People like to imagine negative reviews being written by gleeful, needle-toothed critics, hungry to pounce on art they don’t enjoy like a hyena on a slow zebra. The opposite is often the case: sometimes movies justify a quippy takedown, while others leave you wishing you could just lie and say you really liked them. Such is the case of Hostile Dimensions. Make no mistake: Hughes’ newest microbudget sci-fi/horror found-footage feature is full of heart. And it boasts a very interesting premise: an artist (Josie Rogers) goes missing after discovering a mysterious, freestanding door in an abandoned building, and two documentarians, Sam (Annabel Logan) and Ash (Joma West), try to unravel the mystery behind the disappearance, and the scary door as well, even though Monsters, Inc. should have taught them that disembodied door-shaped portals are, historically, chock-full-o’ monsters.
Hughes is clearly a lover of found-footage filmmaking and wants to shake up the format. Neither his debut film Death of a Vlogger nor Hostile Dimensions are the most traditional takes on the genre. At first, the film’s attempts to deviate succeed: the opening sequence shows the disappearance of Emily (Rogers), before revealing that we’re watching it on a MacBook screen, as Ash works to convince Sam that she needs to get back on the filmmaking horse (following the sudden death of her mother) and help solve this mystery.
It’s a fun setup, and the computer-screen intro evokes the plucky “found screen recording” film Searching (2018) and its sequel Missing (2023), but this thing just never gets into gear. At many times, you think it will, like the “Pandamonium” sequence (where Sam and Ash venture through the door for the first time to explore a panda-themed play restaurant), but it loses the momentum it gains once they come back through the doorway. It introduces Innis (Paddy Kondracki), a university professor with many theories about the multiverse, but then drastically underuses him. Even when it reveals an honest-to-god antagonist (played by Hughes himself), it feels like Hughes only wrote it that way because he didn’t know how else to get to the film’s perplexing conclusion.
Hughes’ antagonist (whose given name is a bit of a spoiler) is representative of the movie’s biggest problem. Hostile Dimensions wants us to take an interest in watching Sam and Ash figure out the mystery of the door, but the film itself barely seems interested in making its twists and turns satisfying or well thought-out. Horror and sci-fi plots don’t need to be spelled out or thoroughly explained, but Hostile Dimensions relies too much on shrugging off the urge to develop its own ideas. When it tries to explain why there’s a door (and, perhaps, many other doors), it feels like half-baked bullshit that got written on a napkin the day the scene was filmed. We’re supposed to care, but nothing is ever compellingly explained to get us across that finish line.
It doesn’t help that everyone in this film lacks the conviction to sell its more ludicrous aspects. Take a look at a movie like Donnie Darko: the plot is absolutely bonkers, but it’s beloved by many because every actor in it took it as seriously as possible. Found-footage rides a fine line because you’re meant to believe the characters are real people; if everyone is too good, it stops it from feeling believable, but if everyone is too mediocre, the illusion is ruined. Hughes is not bad at found-footage, but the dialogue is incredibly unnatural (an example: “No police.” “All right, Captain ACAB!”) and everyone delivers it terribly. Even the grief that Sam is trying to overcome feels hollow. Seeing her dead mother through the door is what pushes Sam to want to explore the mystery in earnest, but Logan lacks the confidence to pull off such emotional heft.
There are so many areas where you wish this film’s microbudget was just a little bit less micro, from the painful VFX (which felt stylish in The People’s Joker but felt ghoulish here) to costuming so underdeveloped, Emily spends the film’s climax in pajama pants and an oversized hoodie. You can tell Hughes is legitimately a fan of found-footage, but in some moments, it feels possible that he’s a fan only because it allows its practitioners to get away with poor shot composition, clunky dialogue and wooden acting more easily than other genres. Hopefully Hughes is able to get some eyes on Hostile Dimensions — the ideas are there, and if you aren’t the kind of person who overanalyzes every piece of media, you’re likely to have a pretty fun time. If nothing else, it leaves you hoping that he gets more funding for his next film, with a budget just big enough to let him breathe easy and figure out how to really make it work.
Photo courtesy of Dark Sky Films
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