Short Film: The World Over (2018) - Reviewed



While understanding there is a true and honest art to making a short film, I usually only watch them as a time filler while I am working. It is not that I do not like the genre, I just do not believe that you can really create a proper motion picture in the short span of fifteen to thirty minutes. I love detail, like a lot of people do I suppose, and short attention span theater historically has never really delivered that for me. That is not to say that short films are not important! The greatest directors of our time cut their teeth in short films.

So, when The World Over came across my desk to review, I came into it cold to be as objective as possible while screening it. I am glad I did, because The World Over was a wonderful surprise for something I did not have very high expectations of.



Heath Michaels manages to cover a lot of ground in its modest fifteen-minute run time. This gives The World Over the density of a brick, immediately pulling you in and making you think. The key word here is ‘think’. There are a lot of subjects presented in The World Over that are very heavy in emotional scope and intellectual nature. This makes The World Over a pretty wild ride in its short run time.

The World Over, predictably, left me wanting more as it ended. Knowing this is just a short film though, I have to put my feelings aside from this fact. The World Over is a fantastic, abbreviated journey to other places we can’t explain.


--Scott Lambert