Graham Hughes’ “Hostile Dimensions” (2024) offers an imaginative visual quicksand of constantly shifting images that animate the uncomprehending time and space of infinite dimensions. It is a low-budget fare, but its low-budgetness endows it with a palpable nightmarish aesthetic that the high-budgets would, in all probability, discard as campy. The film might be a silent sci-fi lurking in the shadows until it gets picked up years later and declared as pathbreaking given its ingenuity despite its shoestring budget. Twists and turns galore, you are invited to venture into the world of Hostile Dimensions.
Hostile Dimensions (2024) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis
Why is the innocuous white door a cause of concern for everyone?
Friends and documentary filmmakers Sam Shields and Ash Shah come across a video on the internet that unwittingly captures the moment when a local graffiti artist gets drawn in through a free-standing door. Just before the footage ends, the camera glimpses a pygmy creature, most certainly supernatural, with glowing red eyes. There has been no communication from the other side ever since the girl went missing. The girls know this could be their most ambitious and persuasive work if produced. The girls decide to meet the man behind the camera, Brian, to narrate the events following the disappearance of his girlfriend, Emily. Throughout his interview, it seems that Brian is enforcing impressions.
The girls place the door in Ash’s drawing room. As they try to record the activities that transpire on the other side of the door, Ash tries to feel the surface of the mirror that the door gives way to. Ashly is startled to feel a human touch, almost like her reflection touching her back. At this moment, Sam notices her dead mother peeking from the other side. Sam watches, stunned, as a didactic talking dog appears on the other side after her mother, asking them not to fear. The girls try to attach some meaning to the meaninglessness of what they just encountered. Could it be a gateway to hell, could it be a perception accompanied by a process of disillusion, or could it be the effect of a hallucination caused by a gas leak?
Muft Aalingan or Free hugs
Next, we know the girls are sending a remote-controlled racing car strapped with a camera to survey the new backdrop of the door – a game zone of a mall. The game zone is peppered with images of pandas. In fact, its name ‘Pandamonium’ is a wordplay. While frolicking around the game zone, albeit surreptitiously, the girls find arrow signs in different languages, including Gujarati and Hindi, that invite them to a corner for free hugs.
Despite not being too keen on getting hugged, the girls follow the signs and stumble upon a huge stuffed toy panda. Ash warns Sam not to loiter around as it could be dangerous. Animated by some unmasked force, the stuffed panda soon rises up and unleashes a host of tentacles from behind. This is what the signs meant when it said ‘free hugs.’ The girls get chased by the panda but manage to get saved by a whisker.
The 1997 video and the mystery of the Neon Monster
The girls approach a college professor to help them understand what they are dealing with. Innis is stunned to see the videos that the girls show him. Innis, however, shows them another video that exists on a subreddit. The video is from 1997. It was made by an urban traveler who went missing in an abandoned building, like Emily, in Mexico. His camera was found two weeks later, safely recording the uncomprehending events that occurred prior to his disappearance.
The video, in a dizzy handheld perspective, captures an abandoned warehouse. The camera owner surveys the place. However, in the end, he arrives at the forest on the backside of the building, where the camera captures several neon balloons populating a swamp. The man gets shot in the leg. A neon green monster attacks him as he tries to look up and search for the perpetrator.
Unveiling the “Wolf Door”: A journey through ancient portals and personal realities
Innis explains that an unofficial hamfisted theory on Reddit explains these unexplained phenomena. According to the theory, several ancient civilizations attempted to open a portal to another dimension. The doors, a physical tool, were apogees to their procedures of summoning the other side. A lone door– Innis calls it the ‘wolf door’- has appeared in several paintings of varied ancient civilizations. There is also a swirling narrative that warns of active cult members or believers who sacrifice their fellow humans to appease the entities on the other side of this door so that our world gets spared from their wrath.
Ash and Sam invite Innis to the apartment to have a look at the door. Innis asks Ash about her favorite animal, and she replies that it is the humpback whale. Following five seconds of rigorous quietness, Innis ventures through the door, followed by Ash and Sam. A stunning visual of a colossal, foreboding stone pyramid invites them. Innis explains that the door recalls images of one’s personal past or imagination. They watch ecstatically as giant whales float around in the sky with the white clouds.
How does Emily reappear?
The three–Ash, Sam, and Innis– sleep unaware as the door opens and closes on its own. Their camera, however, records it. Ash’s screams wake the other two up. Ash, panting and huffing, tries to describe an entity that is looking over her from the edge of her bed– and it is not the panda. They anxiously wait outside Ash’s bedroom to take their turns in having a look at the mysterious creature. Suddenly, Emily appears. Emily recounts that the fuzzy world that she slinked into had a dark church populated by monsters. Brian is informed of Emily’s arrival, and he appears at their door in no time.
Brian, whose arrival is marked by the incessant buzzing of the doorbell, appears in a yellow hoodie. Emily, however, fails to recognize him. It is then revealed that the guy is not Brian as he tries to take all four down with a stun gun. The guy drags an unconscious Ash to the other side of the door. Sam and Emily embark on their journey traversing the multiple dimensions to find Ash while Innis is directed to venture out of the apartment to find the real Brian.
The Last Expedition – Is Ash found?
Sam and Emily cross the threshold of the door and reach an unpeopled beach where several other doors – variously colored, blood splattered, and sometimes even bearing the name of the owner – are placed like Stonehenge. One of the doors leads them to an abandoned urban warehouse with graffiti plastered all over its walls. But they are scared to bolt out of it as a humongous mannequin that covers the whole sky sets its inanimate eyes on them. The next door leads them to a dark church. Sam and Emily find another Emily from a different universe, who is all bloodied, placed at the altar. The sound of sirens makes the setting even more anxious, and the shadows of a huge hand seen from the window imply that something more sinister is waiting outside. They do not save the doppelganger Emily and run.
Innis uncovers the terrifying truth behind Brian’s disappearance
Innis, on the other hand, shows up at Brian’s apartment. The glowing light emanating from the powered-on laptop in Brian’s living room invites Innis. A video draws his attention. In the video, the guy purporting to be Brian, the Not-Brian, claims to be an outcast who is lured into the world of occult and sacrifice. His self-flagellating self – quite literally as he picks out his fingernail as a form of sacrifice – has opened up the portal to the other world through the door. To this end, he has concocted a magic chalk.
To dominate the whole world, which seems to be so apathetic toward him, he hatches a plan to play nasty with the door. He fixed the door in the middle of the abandoned warehouse where Emily and the real Brian appeared a few moments later. In Brian’s absence, Not-Brian can be seen pushing Emily through the door and sacrificing her to the world beyond its threshold. Traumatized by the event, the real Brian runs away, and the Not-Brian has his eyes glued on him. Innis finds a floorboard in the living room that leads to a dark, decrepit chamber. Brian has been surviving in this chamber, tossing and turning between portals.
Sam’s battle across dimensions: confronting Not-Brian and the tentacled horror
The Not-Brian shows up peeking from behind a door at the beach. Sam follows him and lands in a populated Taiwanese locality. Within no time, the crowded street gives way to the marshy bog from the Mexican disappearance of 1997. Images of warzones and a fox hunter hiding in the marshes waver before Sam’s eyes as she desperately tries to traverse uncomprehending time and space in search of her friend.
Finally, in one of the dimensions, Sam gets hold of Not-Brian, but he injures her and manages to pin her down to the ground. Sam, however, has a hold of his magic chalk, which he uses to open the portals. Before he can smash her head with a rock, Sam scribbles a portal open with the chalk, and a host of tentacles sliver in from the other dimension. The tentacled creature drags away Not-Brian. Sam reappears at the beach and opens the door leading to the dark church. She finds Ash and Emily behind this door. But they are tormented by the same monster that Brian’s camera captured in Emily’s disappearance footage. They run out and reach the beach.
Hostile Dimensions (2024) Movie Ending Explained:
Is the door to the other dimension indestructible?
The girls find Not-Brian not dead. He warns them of God’s wrath, the God who is on his side, for interrupting his plan of cleansing the world of its impurities. He summons his God and asks him to kill the women who have gathered around him. A sudden bolt of lightning suddenly strikes and obliterates him. A string of lightning from the same God starts, causing the doors to disappear. Ash asks Sam to hurry and accompany her back to their world. Surprisingly, Sam refuses to join them.
Sam negotiates with Ash over the possibility of building a perfect world now that she knows she is suspended in several dimensions. Sam and Ash part ways. Before leaving with Emily, Ash carries a duffel bag into her world. After they return, the door to the other world disappears forever, too. Ash also reveals that while poring over the belongings at Brian’s apartment, they have found a way to make the wolf doors themselves. Thus, it opens the possibility that the wolf doors are here to stay.
What was in the duffel bag?
In the epilogue, the film cuts to seven months later. Ash narrates how there have been several police investigations surrounding Sam’s disappearance, along with Emily’s disappearance and reappearance and Brian being held hostage and the documentary. Ash opens the duffel bag and takes out a smaller version of a wolf door. In fact, this wolf door was present with the other big ones at the beach. Ash opens the wolf door and talks to the entity behind it, asking it to elaborate on its earlier proclamation of embracing change. It turns out that it is the Shih Tzu dog talking. The film ends with its words, ‘Are you ready to begin?’
