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Tuscany, the 1980s. Arthur (Josh O’Connor), an Englishman fresh out of prison, steps off a train and walks back into the small town where his friends are waiting. They are tombaroli, tomb raiders, and Arthur has the gift they need: with a forked stick he can feel where the Etruscan dead lie buried, and he falls over when he finds them. He still calls on Flora (Isabella Rossellini), whose daughter Beniamina (Yile Yara Vianello) he loved and lost, and he begins to notice her housekeeper and pupil Italia (Carol Duarte). What the gang digs up goes to a dealer, Spartaco (Alba Rohrwacher). Alice Rohrwacher writes and directs.
In a sentenceOne grubby cream suit, a forked stick, and two and a half thousand years of other people’s belongings
Alice Rohrwacher’s tale of tomb raiders in 1980s Tuscany is funny, sad and shot with a freedom most films never risk. It wanders for a stretch in the middle, and Josh O’Connor holds it together with a slump and a stare.
Arthur (Josh O’Connor) is asleep on a train when we meet him, dreaming of a woman in a white dress with a red thread coming loose from her hem. He wakes and walks back into the small Tuscan town where his friends are waiting and a prison sentence is just behind him. The friends are tombaroli, tomb raiders, and Arthur is the one who finds the tombs. He does it with a forked stick and a sort of fit: the rod dips, his knees go, and he lands flat on his back above two and a half thousand years of somebody else’s belongings. Alice Rohrwacher’s fourth feature is about what Arthur is looking for down there. We recommend it, with the caveat that it runs 131 minutes and does not need all of them.
O’Connor delivers his lines in Italian and plays Arthur as a man who has stopped trying to be liked. The costume is half the performance: a cream suit he never changes and never washes, worn with a scowl that lifts perhaps four times in the whole film. Vincenzo Nemolato’s Pirro and the rest of the gang treat him as a mascot and a meal ticket at once. Isabella Rossellini’s Flora, a singing teacher gone to seed in a villa her daughters would like her out of, treats him as the son-in-law she never got. She is waiting for her daughter Beniamina (Yile Yara Vianello) to come home, and Arthur is the only other person in town who still behaves as if she might.
Carol Duarte’s Italia, Flora’s live-in pupil and skivvy, cannot hold a tune and is hiding two small children upstairs. Duarte plays her with a wide open face and no guile, and the film turns towards her by degrees.
Hélène Louvart shoots on more than one film stock and the frame keeps changing shape: scratchy and boxy for the gang’s night work, wider and softer for the dreams, with no announcement when one gives way to the other. When Arthur finds a tomb the camera goes over with him, so the horizon flips and we are looking at Tuscany upside down. We laughed the first time. By the third we had stopped, because Louvart holds the shot long enough for it to read as a man lying face up on the ground with the dead beneath him, and it got to us. Emita Frigato’s production design gives Flora peeling plaster and dust sheets, and gives Arthur a shack built into the old town wall, so that his bedroom is several centuries older than he is.
Nelly Quettier’s editing is the film’s chief pleasure. She speeds up the gang’s scrambles into silent-comedy scurrying, runs a shot backwards when it suits her, and cuts from a dream into a kitchen with nothing to warn us. A travelling musician turns up between scenes to sing the tombaroli’s exploits in rhymed verse, and Quettier uses him as a chorus. None of it is tidy. All of it is legible, which is rarer.
What does not work is the middle. A long carnival sequence and the gang’s celebrations go on past the point where they tell us anything, and the business with Spartaco (Alba Rohrwacher), the dealer who buys what they dig up, is played broad. The film knows the rich collectors at the end of the chain are the villains and has little to add to that. For twenty minutes or so we were checking how far in we were, and we resented it, because everything either side is so alive.
Rohrwacher has done this before. Happy as Lazzaro also let time slip without telling us and also put a holy fool at its centre. This one is looser, warmer and funnier, and more interested in the living. The second half takes a turn we will not describe.
See it in a cinema if you can. The changes in grain and frame carry a good deal of the meaning, and they are the first thing a television smooths away. And do not go expecting a heist film. Nobody in it can plan anything, least of all the man who keeps falling over.
The reviews for La Chimera are warm and closely bunched, with nearly every critic landing somewhere between good and very good. Praise clusters first on Josh O’Connor, whose still, sad-eyed turn as the grieving English tomb-raider is widely called the film’s anchor, and second on Alice Rohrwacher’s mixing of earthy naturalism with folk-tale fantasy. Several critics pick out the light in the Tuscan exteriors, the shifting aspect ratios and the way past and present are folded into one stream; a few name the ending as the film’s high point. The comedy sits easily alongside the melancholy for most. Reservations are scarce and mostly minor: that it rambles, that some whimsical touches sit oddly. The dissent is small but real. Paste finds it so fanciful it dulls rather than moves, and Eye for Film thinks it never settles into a shape and runs long for what it delivers. Otherwise the consensus is a settled admiration.
The critic calls it an eccentric and beguiling drama. They single out O’Connor’s sensational performance as the sad-eyed Brit and the deft balance of comedy and melancholy.
Read the full review →The critic calls it a joyous, masterful work of folk magic. They single out the transcendent sequence revealing an ancient shrine buried incongruously near a power plant.
Read the full review →Rohrwacher’s moody and marvellous fourth feature explores a tomb raider’s grief and the moral costs of disturbing the dead through mythic resonance and time-blending storytelling. The critic singles out the sublime ending and the film’s hopeful message about bridging past and present for particular praise.
Read the full review →Rohrwacher’s wistful parable examines ghosts, time and the ownership of the past through a surly British archaeologist turned tomb-raider. The rueful, melancholic film channels neorealist and Straub-Huillet echoes while balancing satire with a profound sense of historical transience.
Read the full review →The review describes the film as an exquisitely crafted, playful and bewitching contemporary folk tale that melds mischief, myth and melancholy with tactile, wonder-infused imagery. It singles out the director’s distinctive magic and the lead performance for making the story feel alive and emotionally resonant.
Read the full review →Rohrwacher crafts a sun-dappled Italian fable of incandescent beauty about loss, time, and the significance of ancient relics beyond their market value. The critic highlights the film’s exquisite blurring of the tangible and ethereal, along with its playful yet soulful perspective on mortality and legacy.
Read the full review →
2018 · Rohrwacher’s previous film, where time slips without warning and a holy fool walks through it
1954 · An English marriage comes apart among Neapolitan ruins; the dead are underfoot here too
2010 · Thai ghosts join the family at dinner, and nobody thinks to make a fuss
1978 · Olmi’s Lombard farming families, played by real farmers, across a year; the soil matters here too
2021 · A child meets her mother at her own age; grief handled with the same light touch