Simon Stone is a theatre director who came to film with a gift for two people in a small space and a weakness for the crowd that arrives afterwards. The Dig shows both, and we rate the first more than the second.
Fi1m perspective
Ralph Fiennes kneels in a Suffolk trench and reads the soil the way other men read newsprint. That is the image at the centre of The Dig (2021), and it is the kind of thing Simon Stone does well: two people, a small space, and something buried between them that the film is in no hurry to name. Mike Eley shoots the mound under enormous skies, and Stone cuts against the usual heritage rhythm, so that for an hour it does not feel like a costume drama at all.
Stone came to films from the theatre, and it shows in both directions. He began as an actor in Australia, founded The Hayloft Project in Melbourne in 2007 and made his name rewriting Ibsen, Lorca and Chekhov into the present day, first at Belvoir in Sydney from 2011 and later at Theater Basel. His Yerma (2016) at the Young Vic put its cast behind glass, so the audience watched a marriage come apart as if through a shop window. His first feature, The Daughter (2015), moved Ibsen's The Wild Duck to contemporary Australia. The Dig followed, and The Woman in Cabin 10 (2025), which he also wrote, is a contemporary thriller, which is new for him.
What he brings from the stage is a way with actors and a taste for family secrets. Fiennes and Mulligan in The Dig are quiet, careful and unshowy, and Stone lets them be; nobody makes a speech about the past. We will admit the first hour got at us more than we expected. Fiennes alone with the mound, and Mulligan's widow, who pays for the digging and is not well, add up to a picture of loneliness the film understands completely, and it did not need a word of dialogue to make us feel it.
What he also brings is the adaptor's freedom, and on film that is where he gets into trouble. Once more people arrive at the mound, the film turns to them, and their subplots sit heavier on the story than the burial ship ever does. Some critics have complained that the film is loose with the record; we minded more that it never says why Sutton Hoo mattered. Anglo-Saxon is said with reverence and we take the film's word for it.
Stone has said his heroes are women, and his stage work has been built around them. Whether that survives a thriller is a fair question. On the evidence so far he is a director who knows exactly what to do with two people in a hole, and is still working out what to do when the rest of the cast climbs in.
Biography
Simon Stone is an Australian film and theatre director, writer and actor. Born in Basel, Switzerland, he grew up in Melbourne and Cambridge, and trained at the Victorian College of the Arts.
Stone directed the feature films The Daughter (2015), which he also wrote, and The Dig (2021). He is also known for his work in theatre, including productions such as Yerma at the Young Vic.
