Worlds Apart
2023 · 17m
Directed by Timothy Wade
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
A WW2 English soldier wakes from a coma in a London hospital to find a mysterious old man sharing his room, whose truth about the war blurs reality and fiction.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Wade's doing the unreliable narrator thing, sure, but there's something too reverential about how it handles the war material—the surrealism feels like it's *asking* permission to be weird rather than just being it, which makes the whole reality-blur premise feel more mannered than genuinely unsettling.
A formally considered meditation on memory and testimony that situates itself squarely in the tradition of British psychological realism; the 17 minutes spend their time earning the collision between documentary truth and subjective experience, with editing that knows exactly when to let ambiguity breathe.
The film lives or dies on whether you buy the moment the old man's account destabilizes the soldier's certainty, and Wade commits fully to playing that shift through performance and sound design rather than exposition—that choice to trust the audience's discomfort is what makes the budget constraints feel like stylistic decisions.