Possible Worlds (No cert)

by CHRISTOPHER TOOKEY, Daily Mail

Possible Worlds is very pretentious.

It starts out as though it is going to be a murder mystery, with police investigating why a handsome man (Tom McCamus) has been murdered in his apartment and had his brain removed.

But the solution is obvious from early on, and it's neither very original, nor particularly credible

For this is not really a murder mystery, but - aagh! - another Canadian art-house movie by that poseur extra-ordinaire, Robert Lepage.

Mystery and suspense are jettisoned early on, and instead we are treated to various interminable, badly written, talky scenes of life as a disembodied brain might experience it.

These involve the same woman (Tilda Swinton) in a variety of guises - unimpressed scientist, sexy career-woman, anxious wife, total stranger.

The all-pervading pointlessness of the exercise is made more intolerable by its air of intellectual superiority. It raises questions of identity, alternate universes, the importance or otherwise of imagination, but has nothing whatever to say about any of them.

It mixes in some nonsense about flying saucers which suggests that Mr Lepage or writer John Mighton may have seen, and thoroughly misunder-stood, an episode of The X-Files.

The sci-fi overtones don't make sense, don't lead to anything and serve only to make the film more of a boring shambles than it already is.

I should record that the look of the film is fashionably austere, and that some of the dissolves between scenes are visually interesting.

These are not enough, though, to save Possible Worlds from being excruciatingly tedious, and yet another horrible monument to subsidised film-making.

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