Fantasies of a Rescue Dummy (2026)
You have to admire a film that can take an idea this daft and make you feel something with it. Adrian Maganza's Fantasies of a Rescue Dummy is one of the more genuinely original shorts I have come across, a hybrid of live action and animation that asks a question no one has ever thought to ask: what is going on in the mind of the rescue dummy forgotten at the bottom of the swimming pool? It is charming, inventive and a little melancholy, and a likeable three stars.
The premise really is the whole hook, and what a strange, lovely little hook it is. Our hero is a training dummy left sunk at the bottom of a pool, and behind his fixed plastic smile a whole inner life churns away: a longing for touch, a yearning to be lifted and saved and held in a swimmer's arms the way the other dummies are. The film plays that pathos completely straight, mining real feeling from a lump of rescue plastic, and it is funnier and more affecting than it has any right to be.
Formally it is a clever mix. The animated passages, which give us the dummy's imagined fantasies and inner world, are genuinely vibrant, beautifully drawn and full of movement, and they are the clear highlight. Around them sit live-action underwater shots of people being rescued, filmed from a range of perspectives, which ground the dummy's dreaming in a real, chlorinated world. The music threads it all together nicely, carrying the longing without overselling it.
If it does not quite rise above good, it is simply a matter of room. At under seven minutes it is a sketch of an idea rather than a full exploration of it, over almost as soon as it has set its odd little world up, and I came away feeling the concept had more in it than the runtime allowed. That is partly the nature of a short, and the brevity keeps it from outstaying its welcome, but a touch more time to deepen the dummy's plight would have pushed it higher.
Three stars. Fantasies of a Rescue Dummy is a witty, tender and genuinely inventive little film that wrings surprising emotion from the unlikeliest of protagonists, carried by lovely animation and a nice melancholy streak. It does not have the minutes to become more than a charming curio, but as curios go it is a real one, and well worth seven minutes of your time.
Fantasies of a Rescue Dummy screens at the BFI London Film Festival.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from Country United Kingdom: The Red Shoes (1948), The Driver (1978), Interstellar (2014)
More from the 2020s: All That's Left of You (2025), The Whale (2022), Look Back (2024)
More animation: Jabberwocky (1971), Dance of the Spirits (2026), Hey, You (1976)
