Visiting Hours

It started as a paragraph. A man in a room sharing old memories with a friend. A nurse brings his food and he tells her she's just missed John, but nobody ever leaves the room, so you know John was never there.

The first draft put him in a secure psychiatric room. I moved him to a care home, because far more people have sat in one of those rooms with someone they love, and it's sadder for it. After that, three decisions did most of the work. An old photo tells the backstory, so nobody has to say it. The nurse beat is framed so the door and John's empty chair are in shot together, so nobody could have slipped out. And the light tells you which world you're in: with John, the room is lit by one warm lamp. Reality is cooler.

Everyone was cast as a locked reference before I made a second of video: a character sheet, then four expressions each, and every prompt pulls from the same source so a face never drifts between shots.

John is frozen at 35, in the same corduroy jacket in the room and in the 1989 photo. He looks exactly like he does in the picture because he never got any older, and that tells you what happened to him without anyone saying it. The nurse got a separate lock on her uniform, so her ID badge stays on her left and her fob watch on her right in every shot. It's a small thing, but it's exactly the kind of thing that gives AI away.

The set was built the same way as the cast: the room from the doorway, the reverse angle, an overhead plan, the corridor and the courtyard. Every window shows the same view, a bare silver birch, red brick, a black drainpipe and a blue-grey dusk, so the world outside never changes between shots.

I went over the script until every line sounded like something a person would actually say. The first version had South Wales words in it and the model garbled them (one came out as 'mog'), so it went to plain English with natural accents.

Long pauses read as fake, so I cut them, apart from the sigh before 'Tenby'. Punctuation does the directing: there's no comma before 'love', so the nurse doesn't stop before it. And the moments nobody speaks are written in too. She looks down at him and hides a flicker of sadness before she answers. Those small reactions are where AI acting starts to feel real.

The closing shot is the whole film in one picture: one lit window in a long dark wall, and an old man laughing beside an empty chair. It took three goes.

Extending the original shot invented a new building and faded Tom out of the window. A fresh twenty second take kept the building but put the wrong man in the window, and he vanished at thirteen seconds. The one that made it opens close enough for Tom's face to read, then pulls back past the birch in one unbroken move until his is the only warm window left. He's still there in the last frame.

The song only comes in once the nurse turns and walks on, cut to land in the last fifteen seconds. Earlier drafts of the lyrics described the clothes, the tea and the nurse. The final one only says what the picture can't, which is what Tom believes: "And when they say you're gone, I close my eyes, and you're here."

For the end card, his window stays lit in the dark after the picture fades, with Tom still laughing inside it, and then the lamp goes down for the credits.