Living life backwards has been a theme that preoccupied philosophers and thinkers over the years, and began to spread into the arts somewhere at the end of the 19th century. Philosopher Søren Kierkegaard stated in one of his essays that “life must be understood backwards, but it has to be lived forwards”. As we’ve said, this theory was propagated into arts, and even the great director Woody Allen had a quote concerning the same issue. He said: “In my next life I want to live my life backwards. You start out dead and get that out of the way.” So based on this impressive background, we have a new perspective through which we should discuss Michael Davis’s work.

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First of all, this short has immense potential, being one of the fewest telling a story in such a manner. The fight seen backwards, the waiting to see the interior motif that started the fire is crucial and Michael Davis did his best in creating suspense. Even though at some point we were in doubt when we saw the fake blood makeover, we truly understood the general idea of an old-school narrative and coped with this fact.

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Usually, when we watch movies (‘we’ here referring to audiences in general), we tend to take sides. In ‘Hindsight’ it is very hard to take a side, because as the short goes by, a new side of the action unveils, and it is nearly impossible to decide. Of course, as we reached the end, we understood who was the good, the bad and the…lure; but that came only after we managed to pass an intense process of false anticipation.

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In other words, ‘Hindsight’ proved Kierkegaard’s theory right once again, life being better understood backwards, because in this way we get to understand way better the human behavior, getting us surprised with each moment that goes by.

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Written by Vlad A. G