Here is an astonishingly effective New Zealand film about dreams, death, community, and the mystical dimensions of the human heart. Harnish McFarlane plays a nine-year-old visionary residing in a small English mining village in the fourteenth century. His older brother (Bruce Lyons) returns from his travels with news of the approaching Black Plague. To avoid sure death, the community needs to place a spire on a cathedral before dawn in a faraway city. In a dream, the boy sees this act accomplished. Accompanied by his brother and three others, he crawls through a shaft in a mountain to the other side of the earth. They arrive in Auckland in the year 1988.

This unusual film, directed by Vincent Ward, has a stark and grim power to it thanks to strong ensemble performances, dazzling cinematography, and Celtic music by Davood A. Tabrizi. The Navigator, subtitled "An Odyssey Across Time," is a cinematic masterpiece that explores the metaphysical dimensions of time travel — a subject either untouched or badly served by less imaginative filmmakers.