Stilts
2019 · 7m · United Kingdom
Directed by Dylan Holmes Williams
Genres: drama, fantasy, satire
Tones: contemplative, mythic, surreal
In a world where the majority of people walk on prosthetic stilts too tall for everyday life, Rafe (Tom Glynn-Carney), tired of the burden, seeks out a medical procedure to shorten them — a procedure that requires being selected and a high pain tolerance. Shorter people can fit under low ceilings and doors, and pass through an especially long passageway toward freedom. A strange, fascinating fairy tale about the modifications people undergo to "pass" in an inaccessible society that could be made more accessible for everyone to thrive.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A disability allegory wrapped in stilt-walker body horror that actually earns its weirdness instead of winking at it—the premise refuses easy sentiment and forces you to sit with the terrible logic of an inaccessible world that blames the disabled for not fitting in. This is the kind of film that makes you uncomfortable *on purpose*, and that's exactly why it matters.
Williams situates this work within a lineage of folkloric cinema and speculative design—the measured pacing and mythic restraint recall Harakiri's formal discipline while the visual language references both Gilliam's grotesquerie and contemporary body-horror cinema, creating a considered response to how representation operates through constraint and passage.
The decision to keep the camera static and observational rather than fetishizing the prosthetics themselves is what makes this work—by treating the stilts as mundane, almost banal, Williams forces the emotional weight onto performance and that single recurring image of the doorway, which does more thematic work than any elaborate set piece could.
Reviews
The short film Stilts excels at creatively demonstrating what is wrong with placing the medical model of disability on a pedestal. Williams ably crafts a strange, fascinating fairy tale that is as odd as it's emotional honesty.