Hindsight (2026)
There is a very specific feeling at the heart of Hindsight that I recognised instantly, and it is the thing that carries Remi R.M. Moses' short further than its slender eleven minutes probably should. This is a warm, nicely observed little film about a young man, his first car and the friendships that slowly drift once life gets in the way, and while it never digs quite deep enough to become something special, it taps a real and universal nerve. Three stars.
Jamal buys his first car, and for a while it is everything: freedom, adventures, daft trips to the drive-thru, hours spent driving nowhere in particular with his mates just because you can. Anyone who has had that first banger knows the feeling exactly. Mine cost fifty quid and both front wheels fell off about a fortnight later, and even that was part of the fun. Hindsight gets that intoxicating early stretch right, the sense that the car is a passport to the best time of your life.
And then it does the sadder, truer thing. Life pulls everyone in different directions, jobs and responsibilities creep in, the trips get rarer, the car gets grubbier and starts to break down, and what felt like freedom curdles into something lonelier. The film is really about that quiet grief of growing apart, of realising a chapter has closed while you were not looking, and as a piece of nostalgia about male friendship and the passing of youth it lands its central feeling cleanly.
Where it falls short is simply depth. At eleven minutes there is only room to really explore one, maybe two of the group, and the rest remain sketches, so the sense of a tight-knit crew drifting apart is told to us more than it is fully felt. It looks good, the estate setting is captured with real texture, and Josh Tedeku makes for a likeable, grounded Jamal, but the film gestures at its themes rather than excavating them, and I came away wishing it had the room to let these friendships breathe before pulling them apart.
Three stars. Hindsight is a likeable, relatable and nicely made short that will ring true for anyone who remembers that first car and the mates who were in it, held back only by a runtime too brief to give its story real weight. It is a lovely, bittersweet sketch, and I suspect Moses has a fuller, richer version of this film somewhere in him.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from Country United Kingdom: The Red Shoes (1948), The Driver (1978), Interstellar (2014)
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