Something Pointless (2026)
Every so often a short film comes along and quietly shames the features. Something Pointless runs a mere fourteen minutes, and in that time it takes on illness, mortality and childhood bullying, and lands an emotional punch that plenty of two hour dramas spend their whole runtime reaching for and miss. Directed by Asa Bailey from a screenplay by Neil Graham and David Cormican, it is currently on an Academy Award qualifying run, and on this evidence the Oscar talk is entirely deserved.
The premise is deceptively simple. Aldous Evans, played by Owen Teale, is an older man facing his own mortality as an illness closes in, and every day he performs one deliberately pointless task in order to feel alive. In his case that means slowly building a piece of artwork on a disused wall out of painted eggshells, a small, strange, patient act of defiance against the idea that any of it matters. It should not move you as much as it does, and yet it does, because Teale plays him with such warmth and quiet dignity that the ritual becomes the most important thing in the world.
Running alongside him is a young boy, credited simply as the Boy Who Never Smiles and played beautifully by Leo Harris, who is bullied at school every day by a group of girls. His headmaster, played by Sule Rimi, frets because the child has stopped smiling altogether. Then he stumbles across Aldous and his wall, and something shifts. The friendship that forms between them is the heart of the film, an unlikely bond between someone at the end of his life and someone still working out how to get through the start of his.
I will not spoil where it goes, except to say that grief eventually enters the picture, and that the boy later meets Aldous's widow Eleri, played with great tenderness by Sophie Thompson. When he finally smiles again, as the two of them carry on the eggshell artwork together, I defy anyone not to feel it. It is a film about legacy, about the marks we leave, and about the idea that the smallest and most pointless gesture can turn out to be the thing that saves someone.
And then there is the finale, which is genuinely lovely. The wall comes alive with animation, the eggshell mosaic blooming into movement as Aldous muses that he has another theory now that he has passed on, though that, he says, is better saved for another time. It is a gorgeous idea, elegantly done, and it lifts the whole piece from touching into something close to magical. Bailey clearly comes from a world of visual craft, and here he uses it not for spectacle but for feeling. The score deserves a mention too, beautiful and understated, carrying the emotion without ever leaning on it.
Four stars, and a thoroughly deserved one. Something Pointless is proof of how much a short film can do when the idea, the performances and the heart all line up, and it says more about how to live, and how to face leaving, in a quarter of an hour than most films manage at eight times the length. If it crosses your path on its festival run, do not let the title fool you. There is nothing pointless about it.
Reviewed from a screener provided during the film's Academy Award qualifying theatrical run at San Francisco's Roxie Theater, 28 August to 3 September 2026.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from Country United Kingdom: The Driver (1978), The Muppet Movie (1979), Interstellar (2014)
More from the 2020s: Look Back (2024), The Whale (2022), All That's Left of You (2025)
More drama: First Zone (2026), Home (2026), Hijra (2025)
