The Navigator

THE NAVIGATOR is a singular experience, a time-warp, Chinese-box puzzle of a film that bespeaks the obsessed vision of its writer-director Vincent Ward. It begins in 1348 in Cumbria, England, where a psychic young boy, Griffin (Hamish McFarlane), dreams of a way to save his village from the advancing black plague. He leads his brother (Bruce Lyons) and four other men on a tunnelling expedition that somehow transports them to present-day New Zealand, and presents them with a chance to ward off the plague. But Griffin has also foreseen that, along the way, one of their number will be betrayed and another will die.

Ward has constructed a haunting fable that only o...