Have you ever let your ambitions blindly guide you through life, rarely allowing your vision to open up beyond what’s in front of you? If you spent your entire life working toward a specific goal, does that automatically justify any decision you make, so long as it takes you closer to that goal?
Why would anybody build a well flush with the ground and not built higher? These are just a few of the questions you’ll be pondering while watching the off-kilter historical drama Dimensions, the impressive feature debut from U.K. director Sloane U’Ren and her screenwriter/composer husband Antony Neely.
Dimensions is a challenge to pigeonhole into a genre, as it takes place in an intentionally imprecise early-20th-century England and focuses on one man’s childhood love. But Dimensions also revolves around time travel, and it isn’t afraid to get a little weird.
To me, it’s as if Mary Shelley wrote about a time machine instead of a resurrected creature, and though our central character Stephen (Henry Lloyd-Hughes) isn’t as singularly interesting a character as Victor Frankenstein, he is every bit as driven, which makes him a wild card. You never know what kind of self-effacing thoughts traipse through his mind.
As a child, Stephen’s two best friends were Conrad and Victoria, and the three spent their time playing in the outdoors, where they came upon a well that seemed to go down forever. It’s clear that both boys have a strong fondness for Victoria, and so when she gets lost down the well, it’s a life-changing event for everyone.
Cut to the future in Dimensions, where Stephen has become a theoretical physicist declaring that there are infinite dimensions with infinite events happening at once.
Because of this, he says, traveling back to the past will not affect the present, as there is already some other version of that happening elsewhere.
Yet he’s made it his life’s work, along with his now-assistant Conrad (Sean Hart), to invent a time machine out of assorted electronic parts and a piano, if only to see Victoria for the briefest of moments before that fateful day. When a young woman named Annie (Olivia Llewellyn) shows interest in his studies, Stephen is blinded by his work, not realizing that not all things need to be sacrificed for love.
Dimensions, like About Time or Safety Not Guaranteed, uses time travel as a plot device but mostly to reveal things about the characters. It is an obsession like any other, albeit one that bears interesting fruit. Stephen’s lofty goals and unwillingness to accept personal outside funding create tension between him and Conrad, as his stubbornness limits their success. But there are other things forever left unsaid hanging between the two men in every scene.
If there are faults in Dimensions, they are perhaps slow pacing and slight story, but both play into the film’s tone, which rides a non-maudlin wave of dread. Because U’Ren takes her time in setting these scenes up with rich cinematography, there is no overstating the sideways mental spiral that engulfs these characters. I spent much of the movie waiting for another shoe to drop. And I say another, because there are indeed some surprises to be had here.
Building A Different Kind Of Time Machine
The film’s handmade science fiction was a deliberate choice. In a 2010 interview with Pinky’s Indie Film News, U’Ren explained that the limited budget meant saving effects for the moments that needed them. Stephen’s workshop was designed around older materials and mechanisms, with equipment failures kept closer to a meltdown than a blockbuster explosion. Brass, timber, leather and valves belonged in this world; sleek futuristic technology did not.
The setting was similarly flexible. U’Ren said costume designer Rose Bennett worked across two broad periods, moving from the 1910s and 1920s into the 1930s and 1940s without pinning the story to an exact year. The filmmakers wanted the feeling of an era rather than a calendar date. A property beside the River Cam, including its orchard, helped inspire the story’s setting, while Neely’s interest in a video explaining multiple dimensions supplied another starting point. The film’s period atmosphere and science-fiction premise developed alongside each other.
The Dimensions direction, especially in the beginning when the characters are children, is just lovely, adding a sense of visual magic before we even realize how fantastical the story gets. After watching, I’m still quite enamored with the well, both because of the role it plays and because of how beautifully it is framed each time it is shown. U’Ren adds warmth to many situations that are otherwise cold, and the subtle, effective score complements her work quite well. It’s one of the rare films where you can tell every dollar of the limited budget was put on the screen.
Long after the quaint, fitting ending, Dimensions rattles around in your brain, leaving you wanting, but not needing, every question answered.
