Immediately into the film, one’s attention is immediately captured by a dizzying series of spins – hero Josh Charles meets a beautiful girl (Andrea Roth) at a party who happens to know his name; wakes to find her in his bedroom sitting over him with a knife and runs, only to open his bedroom door and find he is looking out across a desert plain with an approaching rider; they are pursued and shot at with still no idea what is meant to be happening; seek refuge with Rutger Hauer at a seedy motel where an ordinary motel room mysteriously opens into a building the size of an airplane hangar, followed by a subtle attempt by villain Stuart Wilson to take over Andrea Roth’s mind at a museum. Krishna Rao is capable of effectively suggesting the immediately otherworldly by a subtly disquiet shifting of the everyday – Andrea Roth vanishing at the party in the moment Josh Charles turns his back; the sense of eeriness that is created in a perfectly ordinary museum garden when Rutger Hauer suggests that people are watching them.

Unfortunately, Crossworlds becomes a less effective film once it explains what is going on and all the building mystery is brought out into the open. Here the ordinariness that Rao is trying to suggest as being otherworldly becomes a little too apparent – a corridor between worlds is simply a desert canyon filmed through a blurred lens, while movement between worlds is conducted by people simply turning their backs in the desert. Nor, bar a brief visit to a rebel camp at the end, do we get to see anything of the other worlds talked about. Here the film’s medium budget has gotten in the way of the clear scope of imagination that the film promises – Crossworlds would have been a far better film on an A budget.

Despite this, there are a number of highly effective scenes in the latter half – a last minute salvation from a fall from a skyscraper by shifting between worlds; an excellent scene where the protagonists are caught in an illusion where it appears the lift they are descending in is disappearing around them piece-by-piece until they are left hanging from one another’s shoes. Josh Charles gives a good performance as an ordinary average guy propelled into bewildering circumstances.