Souls Divided: Fate, Coincidence, and Their Equally Thoughtless Ways

Ginevra Gentili’s Souls Divided, a 15-minute meet-cute walk-and-talk set in London, dabbles in the tangles of fate and coincidence when mere objects bring together and separate two nightbirds who do not look eye to eye but enjoy the company enough to while the hours away together. 

It will take until the end of the film to understand why James (Connor Wulfric) presumes to light Juliet’s (Alina Allison) cigarette for her with her own lighter. They have just met, he does not know her name yet, he has taken the opportunity to pick up the lighter she dropped to strike up a conversation. But it is easy to forget the minor transgression once the banter launches in earnest. She has a cocaine-and-sad-eyes-in-the-pub-toilet air about her; he looks like he will be broken by the stock market. They hit it off like menthol and coke. 

The beauty of the film is split between these two characters who argue about fate for the fun of it, and the effect of the city at night. The cinematography turns up a moving view as Juliet and James wait at the bus stop. There is the wistful awareness of the night’s ephemerality, there is the potential of all that could happen, and there is the humbling magnitude of lives everywhere. Of course, it all goes topsy-turvy once the wine bottle is opened in place of an existential crisis, and the volume on rom-com silliness is turned up high enough to have bus drivers everywhere shake their heads disapprovingly. 

The climax includes a twist that clinches the whole story together, but it is not this that twists the knife for this writer. Instead, it is the prolonged sequence of futility as James tries to keep his story from falling apart and away. While Allison has the task of personifying the stunned emptiness after an abruptly ended line, Wulfric conveys the fear of being trapped with a polite frenzy that echoes over and fills the silence of Juliet’s shock and, dare we say, heartbreak. The feeling takes some time to go away. 

It is quite a lot to pack into a 15-minute plot—in worse hands it might have been unwise—but the story flows rather naturally for the most part; and though this trope is inclined towards bittersweetness, the added temporal limitation as well as the cruelly abrupt ending has made the whole thing just a little bit more poignant. We should have known as soon as a London bus stop was brought in. 

Watch Souls Divided Short Film Trailer