After a near-fatal accident, filmmaker Guido van der Werve muses about the highs and lows of his own life as he endures a long process of recovery. Instead of a linear narrative, Nummer achttien is structured as a series of movements: it departs from the classical documentary to present us with a series of vignettes that combine past and present, existentialist despair and deadpan humour, reflection and creativity, the joys and pains of remembering and forgetting.