Watch Olivia Colman in quirky and touching short film The Kármán line

Doctors are baffled, and her family – husband Shaun Dooley and daughter Chelsea Corfield – struggle to come to terms with the strange malady as a hole has to be cut above her so that she isn't injured.

It's as moving a performance as you would expect from the extraordinarily talented Colman and the film's director Oscar Sharp says working with her was "a dream".

"She's exactly as lovely as she seems," says Sharp, "and endured hours every day in that harness with a wonderfully kind and cheerful attitude, with the crew and her co-star Shaun Dooley taking turns to carry her on their shoulders between takes.

"She eventually owned up that the harness was chafing quite a lot, and we ended up lining it with extra large sanitary pads to make her more comfortable. The sight of her tugging those out of every nook and cranny at the end of each shoot day cracked up the whole crew."

But Colman didn't just make her colleagues laugh, Sharp recalls.

"It says a lot about her genius I think; one minute she's filling a room with laughter, clowning between takes, then the next moment – even in this weird story where she had to act while strung in a harness or teetering on a green box in battering wind – she can still deliver the kind of raw human vulnerability that had the whole crew in tears, over and over. I'll always be so grateful that she saw the potential in the idea. It feels great that the whole world finally knows her name."

Oscar Sharp is currently working on a TV show called The Human Conditions, loosely inspired by the The Kármán Line, in which a young doctor investigates a series of absurd metaphorical illnesses.

Oscar Winner and #ShortFilmHero Olivia Colman stars in the short film The Kármán Line. Check out other Oscar winners at https://shorts.tv/theoscarshorts/ where you’ll find the Oscar Nominated Short Films. And be sure to check out @shortstvus