Half an hour or so into this monumental exercise in handkerchief-wringing, the principal stars, their children and their pet dog have died.

It isn't the happiest of thoughts for Christmas week.

Yet Vincent Ward's extraordinary new film is an uplifting, even inspiring, affirmation of the potency of the human spirit.

Save for an opening sequence and a series of flashbacks, it takes place in the afterlife, a pastel-coloured oil painting of a place, in which the line between reality and fantasy exists only within the mind.

Robin Williams is the heaven-dweller who must cross over into the "other place" to rescue the soul of his wife and thus prove that theirs is a love which transcends simple mortality. It is sentimental, probably overly so, and yet moving still.

Williams plays a doctor called Chris Neilsen, who meets the love of his life, Annie (Annabella Sciorra) on holiday in Switzerland, marries her and raises two children in an apple pie of a home.

Chris survives first the death of the family pet, then the incalculable loss of his children and a resultant suicide attempt by his wife. As he drives to meet her for an anniversary date, his car crashes in a tunnel and he too is killed.

The heaven into which he is plunged is a reflection of himself. He admires paintings of landscapes, and so his heaven is a three-dimensional artist's canvas.

This setting is achieved by computer imaging: the first time, perhaps, that special effects on such a scale have been used to create beauty not destruction; to stimulate the imagination, not obviate it.

The first thing he sees is the family dog. "I've screwed up. I'm in dog heaven," he says.

Back down on earth, the cross of living without her children and her husband is too heavy for Annie to bear, and in the depths of her depression she takes her life.

In heaven, Chris has a guardian angel (Cuba Gooding Jr) who communicates to him the news of Annie's death. However, Chris's longing for a reunion is dashed by the discovery that as a suicide, she is condemned to spend eternity in hell.

Choosing not to heed the angel's warning that no-one has done it before, Chris sets off to redeem his wife's soul. He finds hell a mass of humanity and a cacophony of voices crying not to be there. "I never took more than 30 per cent from any client," pleads a lawyer.

The overdone conclusion to Chris's journey lets the film down slightly, as does the one-dimensional performance of Robin Williams - a man who has no peers as a comic but who in straight roles tends to convey depth of feeling merely by mumbling.

Nevertheless, What Dreams May Come is a significant film; one which even if you reject its relentless sentimentality will make you upwardly re-estimate the value of your own loved ones this Christmas.

David Behrens

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.