Rialto 5:15

At just eighteen minutes, Reuben Hamlyn’s Sunday’s Children somehow feels impossibly expansive. Premiering in the La Cinef selection at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, the film carries the emotional density of a fractured romance, a philosophical argument, and a quiet existential crisis all compressed into the space of a short film.

Its premise alone contains enough psychological and moral tension for a feature: a man desperate to become a father spends a weekend falling for a woman convinced God has warned her never to have children. Yet what makes Sunday’s Children so striking is not simply its subject matter, but Hamlyn’s determination to resist simplification. The film rejects the increasingly flattened moral architecture of much contemporary storytelling, where characters often exist as ideological stand ins or social archetypes rather than recognisably contradictory human beings.

Speaking to Rialto 5:15 ahead of the film’s Cannes premiere, Hamlyn described the unusual challenge of trying to “squash all of the themes and many of the stages of a feature story into the short film.” What emerged was not simply narrative compression, but a film formally interested in the way human beings compress their own lives into manageable stories.

“When we’re talking about why we’ve decided to have children or leave our job or change careers,” Hamlyn explains, “we normally do that in these conversations which are very rushed… we have to compress them into these short sound bites, and that short sound bite is never really representative of the true complexity of what leads you to make a decision.”

That idea becomes the film’s governing principle. Sunday’s Children is ultimately about the stories people tell themselves in order to survive their own contradictions. Hamlyn’s characters are not reducible to heroes or villains. They are impulsive, selfish, vulnerable, affectionate, frightened, often all within the same scene.

This refusal of simplification is central to Hamlyn’s philosophy as a filmmaker. In his director’s statement, he describes wanting to examine “how another’s agency can be disregarded when you see your own desire as destiny.” Dennis, played by Maximilian Isaacs with a disarming combination of innocence and emotional entitlement, is not presented as monstrous so much as psychologically incapable of seeing beyond the gravitational pull of his own longing.

“I didn’t want to reduce any character to purely evil or purely good,” Hamlyn says. It is a deceptively simple statement, but one that increasingly feels countercultural. At a moment when much of popular culture rewards instant moral legibility and algorithm friendly archetypes, Sunday’s Children operates almost as an act of resistance against superficiality itself.

Hamlyn acknowledges this directly. “I don’t like characters that feel like archetypes,” he says. “They feel hollow.” Even within the restrictions of the short form, he prioritised characterisation over efficiency, attempting to “cram in these backstories and complicated confluences of desires” into the dialogue and structure of the film.

Yet despite the film’s darkness, Sunday’s Children is frequently funny. It begins haunted by abortion and closes with death lingering quietly at its edges, but Hamlyn deliberately undercuts its heaviness with humour, awkwardness, and absurdity. The tonal balancing act is risky, but it gives the film a recognisably human texture.

“I’m a big believer in the power of making light out of things that are dark,” he says. He speaks about growing up in a family where dark humour became a way of metabolising pain, transforming horrific experiences into moments of fleeting joy. “I really think that’s beautiful,” he adds.

That emotional elasticity runs through the entire film. Conversations drift unexpectedly between intimacy, discomfort, philosophy, flirtation, and comedy in ways that feel less scripted than lived. Hamlyn’s world is one where people joke through despair because that is often the only way human beings know how to remain emotionally functional.

Much of the film’s vitality also comes from its physical construction. Hamlyn repeatedly emphasises movement, gesture, and bodily presence as essential to the film’s emotional language. Discussing the casting of Maximilian Isaacs and Blu Hunt, he describes both actors as possessing not only charm but “incredible physicality.”

Bodies constantly shift within confined spaces throughout the film. Characters lean, dance, drift, retreat, and circle each other restlessly. The camera frequently traps them inside cars, cramped apartments, and narrow frames, creating a visual tension between emotional intimacy and psychological confinement.

One particularly striking sequence, shot largely from the back of a car, initially appears observational before revealing itself as intricately choreographed. Hamlyn explains that the framing emerged from a desire to create movement within an otherwise static composition. “We had to find ways of bringing life into it,” he says.

The result is a film acutely aware of spatial relationships. Characters are constantly framed through barriers: windscreens, mirrors, windows, doorways. Intimacy is repeatedly mediated through surfaces, as though the film itself is quietly questioning whether genuine emotional access between people is ever fully possible.

Even the film’s symbolism resists heavy handedness. A rosary hanging from a mirror introduces Kasia’s religious convictions, but Hamlyn deliberately undercuts the seriousness of the image with what he calls “silly symbols” elsewhere in the frame. The visual language constantly oscillates between sincerity and irony, refusing to settle into either solemnity or satire.

What ultimately lingers after Sunday’s Children is not simply its narrative, but its emotional density. Hamlyn has made a film fascinated by the impossibility of fully explaining ourselves: our desires, fears, relationships, ambitions, or visions of the future. Every attempt at clarity becomes another form of reduction.

Perhaps that is why the short form suits the material so perfectly. Sunday’s Children does not resolve complexity. It compresses it. The film becomes an embodiment of the very thing it is trying to describe: human beings desperately condensing vast emotional worlds into brief conversations, fragile symbols, impulsive decisions, and temporary stories capable of carrying us through the uncertainty of our lives as the children we never really grow out of being.