The path to enlightenment is a hell of a ride in Toshiaki Toyoda’s “Transcending Dimensions.” This loopy, spiritualistic sci-fi shaggy dog story is unlike any other Japanese film released this year. Perhaps the closest point of comparison is the recent work of Gakuryu Ishii, who shares Toyoda’s taste for heterodox thinking and his faith in the mind-altering potential of cinema.
Though this is Toyoda’s first fiction feature since “The Miracle of Crybaby Shottan” (2018), he hasn’t been sitting idle. Starting with “Wolf’s Calling” (2019), he’s been cranking out a string of interlinked short and medium-length films, dubbed the “Mt. Resurrection Wolf” series, featuring many of the same cast of actors.
“The Day of Destruction” (2020) — one of the earliest and most striking cinematic responses to the COVID-19 pandemic to come out of Japan — and “Go Seppuku Yourselves” (2021) both had an unmistakably anti-authoritarian bent. But the later films in the series (released this month in an anthology, “Such Is the Person I Wish to Be”) have turned to more spiritual concerns, albeit with an industrial-strength dose of punk attitude.
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