Sunday's Children review: Reuben Hamlyn's Cannes short on fatherhood, entitlement, and the women who see through it

A young man's dream of fatherhood becomes something stranger and more sinister in Reuben Hamlyn's sharply unsettling short.

For anyone in their late 20s or early 30s, now that some of our friends are starting to have children or at least talking about it, we have probably found ourselves, with some justified acerbity, outraged by their resolve and chilled by the many reasons why they shouldn't. Reuben Hamlyn, the director of Sunday's Children, is with us on this one.

As he introduces us to Dennis (Maximilian Isaacs), a young American man obsessed with procreating and becoming a father, red flags become apparent with growing uncanniness. And the bar doesn't start low. He adopts a disabled cat without discussing it with his girlfriend, then treats her getting an abortion without telling him as an equivalent breach of shared agency. The British-accented narrator, voiced by Hamlyn himself, provides glimpses into Dennis' psyche and his tendency to take things lightly, imagining whole lifetimes with someone in less than a minute, less time than it would take to spell the word consequence for someone of his sensibility.

But just like a lone sperm swimming against the reproductive current, this average young man belongs to a generation that decided "there wasn't a future worth spending much time imagining." Even when he meets Kasia (Blu Hunt), a woman who entertains his musings but remains divinely convinced she shouldn't have children, Dennis breaks out his evolutionary procreation-imperative vocabulary. Still, no argument can beat her words: "As an average American, the best thing that you can do is to not bring another average American into this world." It is clear that the New York-based British director has particular feelings about the people of his adopted home.

As the two spend the next 24 hours together, from Saturday to Sunday, Dennis seems undeterred in his delusions. These fantasies start to occupy a spectrum of extremes: from waking up from an afternoon nap to a room full of bubbles blown by Kasia's neighbour's kids, giving the scene a literal rosy sparkle and announcing a director who trusts his images, to a sex scene where literal scar tissue is being "drawn on" Kasia's back in the shape of a child's drawing of a nuclear family. This male fantasy is projected onto a woman's body in a violent and disturbing manner, and that is not even the worst thing we see. Even when horrific things transpire, Kasia finds herself needing to soothe Dennis' fragile, privileged, average boy's ego when he is outraged by the labels rightly assigned to his misdeeds.

Hamlyn is ambitious enough to use chapters in a short film, a formal demand not even features always justify. But these medieval-painting title cards make it work, establishing Dennis as a man living in a modern world with the sensibilities and urges of a medieval one, while giving the film a sheen of quasi-religious iconography.

Sunday's Children makes us confront the fact that people our age will start having children without fully thinking it through, and it will often be those who can afford it, whether financially or heterosexually. For gay people, the necessary and at times prohibitive scrutiny is already there. But maybe, for anyone who does want children, we should start with a pet? Or maybe not, if Dennis' newly adopted disabled cat is any indication.

Director: Reuben Hamlyn

Writer: Reuben Hamlyn

Cast: Maximilian Isaacs, Blu Hunt, Kristiana Priscantelli, Christian Lorentzen

Production: Obscured Pictures

Running Time: 18 minutes

Rating: 4/5