FrightFest review – Transcending Dimensions
Toshiaki Toyoda’s Transcending Dimensions is an extraordinary experience – it’s about a search for meaning, but probably works best as a trip. A few days after seeing it, I had crystal-clear memories of images, sensations, characters and strange beauties, but couldn’t tell you what philosophical points (if any) the film was trying to make.
The feature follows a set of short films, the Wolf Mountain Shrine Trilogy, and other connected movies are planned. I imagine viewing the whole lot will only compound the effect. It is doubtless significant that Ajari (Chihara Jr), the guru of Wolf Mountain, is a sadistic prankster who encourages the yakuza-like practice of cutting off fingers (someone else’s) as a means to enlightenment … he collects the fingers in jamjars, and there’s a visual echo of a severed digit in a spaceship seen in some very 2001-like voyage-to-the-extremes-of-the-universe sequences. Our truth-seeker is monk Rosuke (Yosuke Kubozuka), who has gone missing up Wolf Mountain, and the noir-like investigator on the case is Shinno (Ryuhei Matsuda), a babyfaced salaryman who is an assassin hired by Rosuke’s girlfriend (Haruka Imo), who may be a ghost, to find out what happened to the missing monk and to terminate Ajari in revenge. It’s in keeping with this view of the universe that the dead aren’t privy to secrets of the beyond and have to hire a hit man to get closer to the truth.
After forty minutes of earthbound plot, with Ajari performing and Shinno observing, the film delivers its title sequence – which also delivers on its title by taking off on a hallucinatory trip through the universe into a science fiction zone. It’s a big risk, since the conventional mystery plot – which has been quite compelling – gets sidelined in favour of a cinematic lushness which makes Tarsem Singh look like Ken Loach. I was fascinated, mesmerised and impressed by Transcending Dimensions, but it’s also frustrating. In life, we never get full answers to the hard questions, but movies can be more satisfying: Junta Yamaguchi’s Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes and River – also FrightFest selections in the Japanese mind-warp vein – are as astonishing, but also give a sense of completion. But Toyoda, who has had an under-the-radar career compared with some of his contemporaries, takes a big, big swing here …
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