Review by Neil Davey
Stars Kelly Adams, Jonathan Rhodes, Lucy Evans, Calita Rainford, David Horton, Kevin Lehan, Kris Tyler, Vivienne Harvey
Written by Debbie Moon & Brad Watson
Certification UK 15. As for the rest of the world, no idea but I hope, for their sakes, they never find out.
Runtime 95 minutes
Directed by Brad Watson
Every year, every film festival throws up some absolute gems that, for a variety of reasons, never attract a distributor. They live and die briefly, perhaps ekeing out an alternative life on DVD, but leaving the few that did see them charmed and scratching their heads why nobody else spotted the potential. It's one of those perennial mysteries. And it only gets more confusing and baffling when films like The 7th Dimension do get a release.
It pains me to rip into a British film because God knows we need to support them. But when the powers-that-be somehow collude to produce and release something so stultifyingly, hilariously awful, I almost think we don't deserve a film industry.
The worst thing? On paper, and in talented hands, this could have been, well, if not a classic, then certainly watchable and thought-provoking. Computer hackers, conspiracy theories, ancient puzzles and Bible codes are, as well as an effective synopsis of whatever Dan Brown's currently working on, things I'm pretty much a sucker for. The topics covered here — the nature of religion, the power of the human mind, the illusion of reality — are all topics I can, and have, drunkenly and otherwise, discussed for hours. Writer/director Brad Watson has somehow taken these topics and bludgeoned all the interest out of them. The official line is it's "a supernatural thriller." "Supernatural" I might concede but "thriller"? That's a term only notable by its absence.
Two students Sarah (Adams) and Zoe (Evans) meet up and, at Zoe's insistence, head to the flat of the tutor she's in love with. When they arrive, they discover that Malcolm (Horton), the tutor in question, shares a flat with Kendra (Rainford) and the wheelchair-bound Declan (Rhodes) and that the three of them are hackers on a mission. That mission? To hack into The Vatican's archives and unlock the secret of the Bible Code where, by rearranging the letters in the Torah, you can find words that apparently predict the future of mankind. As their computer translates the Torah into two, three and — somehow — more dimensions, Declan becomes ever more powerful, recovering the use of his legs, and unlocking the secrets of the universe and his mind, with, it says here, dramatic results. Or, more accurately, unintentionally hilarious results.
Judging from the actors CVs they've apparently done decent things in the past so it seems harsh to judge them on an inability to deliver the dialogue here as Judi Dench, Helen Mirren and Kenneth Branagh would struggle in these circumstances: trust me, it would take a lot more than seven dimensions to arrange this film into something comprehensible.
Whether you believe in the Bible Code or not, the notion of it is usually fun to debate but, while I'm a firm believer that there are unexplained things out there, this isn't one of them. Hell, you can rearrange letters and words in this review to make the sentence "The 7th Dimension is the best film the world has ever seen" but that doesn't make it true, does it?