Sentiment and understatement meet in this beautifully melancholy (end-of-) life drama, based on Akira Kurosawa’s low-key 1952 gem, Ikiru. Elegantly directed by South African film-maker Oliver Hermanus (who helmed the 2019 adaptation of André Carl van der Merwe’s autobiographical Moffie) and boasting deeply affecting performances from national treasure Bill Nighy and rising star Aimee Lou Wood (regular of the hit Netflix series Sex Education), this deceptively gentle 50s-set film addresses weighty matters of life and death with a winning simplicity that is hard to resist.
Nighy brings his most austere face to the role of Mr Williams, a softly spoken bureaucrat (“a decent sort, if a little on the frosty side”) working in London’s County Hall, where piles of paperwork accumulate in teetering towers of inaction and obfuscation. “We can keep it here for now,” says Williams of a well-presented petition by a group of local women from Chester Street to build a play park on a bombsite – a file that has already done the rounds of umpteen other departments (parks; planning; cleaning and sewage) before returning to his desk, where it will sit and gather dust. “It’ll do no harm.”
