User Reviews

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.

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.

. . . that word would have to be "ack." Too danged artsy, trying too hard to be "avante garde." Stop action photography, cut frames effects, more darkness than a barrel full of--well, darkness, and the pastiest bunch of people I've seen in a long while. Sad thing is, it's a fair story, with some solidly laudable acting (and some solidly BAD, too).

Memento worked because it followed a linear pattern, even if that pattern was reversed. "Tesseract" leaps all over the place, leaving folks with that head scratching, pause-button-hitting sense of "huh?" Sure, you can figure it out, but do you really want to spend the whole movie figuring out time line instead of enjoying the film?

Unless that's your sort of gig . . .

In all? Ton of potential here, not much of it realized.

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")

Take "Memento," throw in a little "Oliver Twist," add a little "Taxi Driver," and then have the whole thing directed and edited by severally mentally deranged gerbils on crack and you get this completely awful film.

At turns boring, overly bloody, and completely incomprehensible, it's got neither good style nor solid substance. The ending is terrible. The middle is even worse.

Pass this one up... until you happen to be a mentally deranged gerbil on crack. Then it might be worth watching.

I have to add two more lines of type to meet IMDb's requirements for writing a long-enough review. That's too bad, because there really isn't anything else to say about this lousy movie. Ummmm... so, how are you today? How's the family dog? w00f w00f w00f.

If you've just rented the tesseract and are thinking "man oh man, I hope this is a irritatingly jumpy story, full of dislikable characters and shot in the style of a horrible music video" then guess what bub...this could be the best day of your life. Memento - an intelligent script that, despite being initially difficult is soon understood and fun to think about afterward. The Tesseract - someone throws the script into the ceiling fan and films it in the order the pages happen to land. Redeeming features? The annoying kid gets hurt, which I didn't think would happen. Oh, oh, and there's a thai midget, something you don't see every day. Unless you look in grandpa Charlie's 'special' magazine collection. see yas

Alex Garland is an awesome writer. The Beach novel was great; the movie threw away everything good about it, including the essence of the main characters, and predictably sucked. 28 Days was pretty fun. Haven't read the Tesseract book, but this movie's pretty bad. Pacing's bad, acting's bad, script is bad.

Some of the early visual sequences were done really well, but I hate it when directors use visual type camera effects and pulp-fiction or boomtown type chronology as their MAIN arsenal to grab people's attention, to try to make it look hip. Like another reviewer mentioned, it's not like these things weren't already used in several movies. Couldn't finish the movie. I wonder if Garland was happy that his novel was connected to this film?

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.

after gritting my teeth of why i should keep watching this movie all the way through it, when i got to the end all i could think to myself is 1. why would anybody make this pointless of a movie. 2. why did i keep watching this movie. 3. the clichés where terrible.

they tried to make this movie artsy, but the conclusion of we don't know what lies ahead was over simplified, and never left me thinking about what it meant, because its just something that you already know and there wasn't any new dilemma added to make the idea more complex.

If i were you, and you were thinking about renting this movie, don't. if they show it on TV for free, i'd go out side and do something more constructive with my time.

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.

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 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.

i thought that the movie was well made! i love how everything came together even though the ending was pretty surprising to me at least!! the flashbacks made the movie even better...i thought that some parts were confusing but everything clears up!! this movie was really good! Jonathan Rhys-Meyers did very well in this movie and i thought that he made his part come alive.......everyone did the same thing as well! the director definitely picked a great cast for this movie. the ending made the movie more real for me i don't know how to explain it but it just did! well that is what i thought of this movie and i hope that helps you decide to see it or not!

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