Unicode symbol for space prints some kind of rising dash?

Because space is a special entity used in TeX at level of "typesetting material" (it does not correspond to any character code in the font but it has its base dimension plus stretchability minus schrinkability) then Knuth decided that the slot declared for space in typical text fonts is "free" and he put special character here: the cross dash for polish l.

If you want to put no space at input level in TeX document, then you can write

word{\space}word.

(pdf)tex knows nothing about Unicode so you get whatever symbol is in position 32 in the current font, none of the classic tex fonts is Unicode encoded (they only have 127 characters per font)

Even if you use xetex or luatex, which do use Unicode fonts you should not use \char32, tex does not use a character for space, it uses space of adjustable size.

The actual character you see is the sloping bar intended to overprint an L to make Ł. As position 32 isn't otherwise used this slot was free for such a letter part (just as control character slots are used for ligatures and Greek and other non-ascii characters).