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Directed by Stanislav Buevich
Starring Joanna Ignaczewska and Matt Roberts
Short Film Review by Annie Vincent
Largely, our day to day lives are lived in very small ways: we wake up, go about our day and return to sleep again. Patterns and routines emerge and things bump along ‘as usual’ for a while. Even if our days are much more varied and exciting, there is a certain sense of quiet about each person’s life the majority of the time. Then sometimes, something happens which will shift all of that. It will shift the way you live and it shifts your thinking to, and The 4th Dimension, a (very) short film from Stanislav Buevich, aims to explore that.
The 4th Dimension captures a conversation between a couple about the fourth dimension: time. It appears to be a fairly mundane, scientific sort of discussion until the female character philosophises over the concept of time and how it applies to life, before revealing some big news.
The cinematography in the film is very good. Soft, pink lighting and the white glow through an open window bring an intimacy to the whole film. The close camera work and (slightly sickly) caressing between the couple, played by Ignaczewska and Roberts, presents the clearly loving relationship between the characters. The film was nominated for a Best Cinematography award at the London BFI Film Festival which is well deserved for the film’s consideration of lighting and angles and it is held well throughout the 6.22 minute run-time.
However, the script is a little offbeat and whilst its easy to recall a time when something has happened to make us all a little philosophical, the discussion of what the fourth dimension might be and how it might apply to our world is pretty high brow and, towards the end, a little difficult to follow. As a springboard into the news that the female protagonist delivers at the end, it is incredibly peculiar and even now, whilst typing this, I’m unsure how or why the news she wished to share would make this character consider the fourth dimension in this way. The news she shares is life-shifting and exciting and would definitely alter your world view, but reaching out towards scientific theory is unlikely to be a direction many would go in with their thoughts.
The technical aspects of this film are good and are convincing, along with the relationship portrayed by the actors, but the motivation behind this highly scientific discussion and indeed the script itself, isn’t completely evident and seems incongruous to the very romantic and realistic relationship we see on screen: audiences may come away wondering what this film was really about.
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