The Tesseract

Based on a novel of the same name by Alex Garland The Tesseract starts off looking unpromisingly like a standard Asian action movie with Matrix-like aspirations, but stick with it and it develops into a serviceable drama utilizing the criss-crossing destinies structure with an eye more on the cross-over Anglo-American market than a domestic Thai audience.

Jonathan Rhys-Meyers is a strung-out drug courier waiting in Bangkok for a consignment whilst Saskia Reeves is a psychologist who is interviewing street children about their dreams for a research project and Alexander Rendel is a young dogsbody employed in their hotel who makes most of his money stealing from guests and predictably enough, makes a hash of everyone's lives in so doing.

These three provide the heart of the story whilst the body count aspect is provided by two warring crime gangs fighting over the aforementioned consignment. Mercifully, there is not too much gun play and gratuitous machismo, the stylistic proclivities being largely subsumed to the thematic concerns, which are unneccesarily verbalized in the latter part of the movie. Perhaps the novel made more of the multi-dimensional aspects alluded to by the title but here they are no more than extraneous stylistic devices used to trick out what is a fairly conventional but reasonably effective thriller.

 

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