‘Living’ review: Dir. Oliver Hermanus [Sundance 2022]

Bill Nighy is career-best form in this stunning re-telling of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 masterpiece, Ikuru. Living is a stunning, unmissable piece of work from Oliver Hermanus (Beauty) who captures 1950s Britain in a gentle film about a man reflecting on his life after discovering he has terminal cancer.

Living kicks off in post-war Britain. It’s 1953 and Hermanus presents a stunning title sequence with titles and imagery designed as if it were a picture released at that very time. The narrative begins in a Surrey train station, passengers assembled in gentlemen’s suits – they are indeed all men – on the platform awaiting the commuter train into London’s Waterloo station. Four are bound for the same office, city hall on the banks of the Thames just, a gentle stroll from the station. Among them is newbie Peter Wakeling. It’s his first day, and three of his new co-workers are explaining the protocol as they wait.

On board, they await the arrival of their boss, Mr. Williams (Nighy) who always travels on the same train, joining a couple of stations down the line. He acknowledges their presence, but they never travel together. In fact, after disembarking at Waterloo, they walk paces behind him, allowing him to be alone. Silence largely occupiest the workday at the London County Council offices, Williams and his co-workers assembled around a dining-room table-sized desk where occasional conversation arises, usually about the job. On this day though, Williams announces that he is to leave early for an appointment, which we soon learn is a doctor’s appointment where he is given the news that he has terminal stomach cancer and only six to nine months to live.

This sets off a chain of events in Williams’s life where his outlook completely changes. The next day, instead of heading to work, something he’s done like clockwork for decades takes a diversion to Brighton where he meets writer Sutherland (a near scene-stealing, magnificent Tom Burke). A night of debauchery in the local bars and strip-tents is on the cards after a chance meeting in a local cafe, an initial reaction to his news, but after this immediate answer, he returns to London, and to his civil servant vocation where he sets to change, starting with an East End children’s playground, the planning for which is buried in mountains of local government bureaucracy.

Adapted for modern audiences by Kazuo Ishiguro, this glorious film is bound to catch the attention of awards voters later this year. Starting with Nighy, who will undoubtedly, and deservedly get recognition for his gentle, solemn turn as Williams, an understated performance, but one that packs an emotional punch from his largely unspoken early scenes, through to the final moments which viewers familiar of the source material will notice instantly.

Sex Education star Aimee Lou Wood is terrific as co-worker Margaret Harris with whom Williams makes a friendship. Her performance is key to the piece, the character absorbing the emotional burden of her boss’s diagnosis through meetings during the workday that she doesn’t agree with. This is also brilliantly coupled with Alex Sharp’s perfectly performed Wakeling, the new boy in the office who Williams also recognises in his ‘awakening’

While the film is faithful to the Kurosawa classic, the update, set just a year after the original was released, is different slightly in the turns in which the narrative is structured and eventually takes us. The aspect ratio and overall look lend to the period, and Jamie Ramsay’s cinematography is breathtaking and Hermanus’ direction flawless.

The film raises many questions as to what we, the viewer would do should we ever have such a fateful appointment with the doctors’ office, but of course also the question of why we wouldn’t, or couldn’t have the same outlook of doing good if there wasn’t a closing date for our story.

With echoes of Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’ and in today’s pop culture, Ricky Gervais’ After Life, if you will, Living is easily one of the best films of the year and an unmissable trip to the movies for a film that somehow almost manages to equal its predecessor in terms of quality, with adding the quintessential essence of being British and keeping that stiff upper lip at times of darkness. A hard watch in places, and very emotional throughout, but also, an absolute joy.