'The Dig' A Review

The Dig is a period drama set in the days leading up to the beginning of WWII. The film focuses on Suffolk landowner and widow Edith Pretty(Carey Mulligan) who hires a local working-class excavator Basil Brown(Ralph Fiennes) to unearth burial mounds on her property.

Mulligan, on a streak, gives a crystalline performance, measured, reserved, but with multi-faceted emotions as Edith, a widow suffering from a terminal illness, grappling with mortality, legacy, and her relationship with her imaginative primary school aged son Robert. Archie Barnes who plays Robert is wonderfully real and grounded and his emotional journey is taken just as seriously as that of the two leads. Fiennes's performance is sublte but tectonically solid as this salt-of-the-earth, self-taught, archeologist. His ease and comfort on screen, his ability to totally subsume a character is immensely satisfying and his chemistry with both Robert and Edith is magnetic. As the dig progresses additional supporting cast enter the film, all good additions, particularly John Flynn as Rory Edith's cousin. Other than some tensions with upper class pompous archeologist Charles Phillips played by Kent Scott, and a subplot about newlywed Peggy(played by Lily James) grappling with her closeted husband, there is very little external conflict, the focus is on the job and in the internal transformations of the character and as such it makes for a somewhat sedate but immensely hopeful and gratifying story.

The camera work is expertly done and films the Suffolk countryside with clarity, beauty, and wonder heightening the allure of the mysterious and titular dig. Expertly paced and edited, perhaps inspired by Terrence Malick, scenes and dialogue are intercut, a moment of silence is shown while dialogue form later or before the same scene(or a previous/future scene) is played. This creates an excellent and much needed momentum for a film that could, for some, come across as slow. Although the film is simple and small there is startling breadth of themes addressed- death, class, history, love, marriage, grief- the list goes on. But none is hit on the head, it's a thrilling journey but a quiet one.

An understated hit, filled with unexpected depths and a few surprises.

Currently streaming on Netflix.

See It.