If you’ve ever stared at a locked door and thought, “I bet that’s where all my bad decisions live,” Hostile Dimensions politely opens it for you and shoves you through. Graham Hughes’ found-footage sci-fi horror is the rare multiverse movie that doesn’t feel like homework; it’s nimble, nasty, and wickedly funny in that “laugh so you don’t scream” register. It also understands the genre’s golden rule: the camera must be both witness and weapon. Here, it’s a crowbar prying open realities—and, occasionally, your nerves.
We begin with the world’s most cursed missing-person case. Graffiti artist Emily (Josie Rogers) vanishes after poking around an abandoned building and a freestanding door that screams “OSHA violation” in twelve dimensions. Enter Sam (Annabel Logan) and Ash (Joma West), two documentary filmmakers whose risk assessment strategy is “press record and ignore God.” Their dynamic is the film’s engine: Sam is inquisitive bordering on reckless, Ash is practical with a side order of doom, and together they form a perfect found-footage molecule—curiosity bonded to denial, stitched together by gallows banter.
The door is the hook, but the movie’s real trick is how it makes traversal feel tactile. Every crossing has a sound and a texture: frames stutter, lenses breathe, the audio thins like air at altitude. You don’t just see Sam and Ash step through—you feel the world misbehave to let them. Hughes uses the grammar of home video—auto-focus hunts, rolling-shutter wobble, clipped audio—to signal dimensional drift. A squeal of RF interference becomes an omen; a micro-glitch is a red flag; a dead pixel is a death sentence. By the second act, you’ll be auditing your own TV for portents.
Found footage often falls into one of two traps: either the camera is absurdly omniscient, or it’s so chaotic you might as well be listening to a radio play. Hostile Dimensions threads the needle. The camerawork sells the illusion of snatched evidence while still framing for dread. Doorways become prosceniums, corridors stretch with paranoiac geometry, and every wide shot is a dare. It’s the best kind of formal showmanship—clever enough to impress, restrained enough not to break the spell.
As Sam and Ash chase Emily’s trail, the film keeps its promises like a very punctual demon. Each new reality escalates: strange graffiti that answers back, rooms that refuse Euclidean manners, people who look right until they blink wrong. And then there’s Not Brian (played by Hughes), whose name is both a joke and a spoiler you’ll be happier discovering than reading about. Paddy Kondracki’s Innis, a local with more knowledge than is healthy, rounds out the human danger: in a universe where architecture lies, the most treacherous floor may still be the one between someone’s ears.
Let’s talk performances, because found footage lives or dies on faces in panic. Annabel Logan is terrific as Sam, mixing curiosity with the stubbornness of a person who would absolutely ignore exit signs if the lighting was good. There’s a moment where her voice tightens mid-sentence and the camera dips a fraction—no musical sting, no monster roar—just the quiet recognition that curiosity has become complicity. Joma West’s Ash is the audience surrogate who refuses to be boring; sardonic, observant, and increasingly brittle, they get the film’s best deadpan: “If we die, I do not consent to the director’s cut.” (Not a real line, but the vibe is immaculate.) Rogers’ Emily haunts without heavy lifting; even in absence she’s active, like a missing letter in a code. Together, the cast nails that “we’re braver as a pair” energy that propels fools and heroes into closets where they do not belong.
The film’s humor is a key survival tool. This isn’t quip-happy gabbing; it’s pressure-release. A tossed-off observation about “budget IKEA limbo” buys you two minutes before the hallway grows extra corners. A dry remark about graffiti “replying” lands right before the walls actually do. The jokes are good because they come from people you like, not a script trying to be cute. When the laughter curdles into silence, you feel the loss of oxygen.
World-building arrives in morsels. We get rules, but they taste like rumors: don’t turn around after you cross; don’t look too long at your reflection; don’t trust familiar names in unfamiliar mouths. The film resists the exposition dump, which is merciful, because nothing kills wonder faster than a PowerPoint. Instead, lore is smeared into the mise-en-scène—symbols layered over symbols, an object that recurs where it shouldn’t, sound cues that belong to places you haven’t been yet. It respects the viewer enough to let you be wrong a few times before you’re terrified you’re right.
Technically, this thing slaps. The sound design is sadistic in the best way: EVP crackle, far-room thumps, and the particular horror of hearing your own voice from the wrong direction. The score, when it sneaks in, is more presence than melody—low industrial sighs that suggest the multiverse is a factory and someone forgot to hit the emergency stop. Practical effects and in-camera tricks do the heavy lifting; CGI is used sparingly, as seasoning rather than soup. One visual gag—involving a door that should reveal a stairwell but definitely does not—is so simple and so effective I briefly considered suing the film for my startled yelp.
Found footage skeptics often complain, “Why keep filming?” Hostile Dimensions answers without speeches: because the camera is proof. It’s a compass, a talisman, and a way to measure whether the world still obeys you. When Sam and Ash stop rolling, you worry more than when the monster appears. The camera isn’t the thing keeping them alive; it’s the thing letting them know they haven’t already died.
Dark humor aside, the film has a romantic streak—romantic in the sense that friendship is a kind of doomed courtship with fate. Sam and Ash carry each other through thresholds they shouldn’t cross, not because they’re fearless, but because no one should be scared alone. That tenderness gives the shocks weight. When the footage frays, you aren’t just losing image—you’re losing people.
The third act is a tidy crescendo of dread, puzzle pieces, and “oh no we’ve been in the wrong room the whole time.” It doesn’t overplay its hand. We get answers, but not a manual; a resolution, but not relief. The final beats recontextualize just enough to make a second watch feel like a new trip. And the last image is exactly the sort of thing you’ll look for in the corner of every room for a week, just in case.
If we’re handing out superlatives, Hostile Dimensions belongs in the “how did they do that with this budget?” hall of fame. It’s agile where many found-footage films are sluggish, and playful where others are self-serious. It never mistakes motion for momentum or lore for story. And it understands that the scariest part of alternate realities isn’t the monsters—it’s the suspicion that the version of you who makes worse choices is the one holding the camera.
In a market stuffed with multiverses the size of phone books, here’s a svelte, nerve-jangling reminder that fewer pages can mean sharper knives. Open the door. Step through. Try not to laugh when the world goes sideways—because the world can hear you, and in at least one dimension, it laughs back.
