112 min | PG-13 | January 15, 2021 | Netflix
Suffolk, 1939. A dying widow hires a self-taught excavator to open the burial mounds on her estate, and they haul an Anglo-Saxon ship out of the soil as the war closes in. It is a film about what you leave behind, and it has the patience to let that sink in.
Suffolk, 1939. Edith Pretty hires Basil Brown, a self-taught excavator, to dig the burial mounds on her estate. What he uncovers is an Anglo-Saxon ship buried in the earth, a find that rewrites the history of early England. War looms over every scene. The Dig is not really about the artifacts. It is about what people leave behind when they know their time is short.
Carey Mulligan plays Edith Pretty as a widow managing a body that is failing her in private. She holds her dignity in public and lets the cracks show only to Brown. Ralph Fiennes plays Basil Brown with a thick Suffolk accent and a quiet refusal to be talked down to. He knows the soil better than the credentialed men from the British Museum, and Fiennes lets that knowledge sit under the surface without preening. Ken Stott plays Charles Phillips as the institutional bully who arrives to seize the dig and the credit. Lily James plays Peggy Piggott and Johnny Flynn plays Rory Lomax, the younger pair the script pushes toward romance with less to work with.
Simon Stone directs from a script by Moira Buffini, and his most distinctive choice is in the sound. Dialogue floats free of the image. Characters speak over shots of themselves walking a field or standing in another room, the conversation detached from the moment it belongs to. The effect turns memory and regret into the texture of the film itself. The Suffolk light does the rest, with wide frames that shrink the figures against the sky and the open ground.
The film works best when it stays with Pretty and Brown and the patient labor of the dig. It works least when it turns to the late romance between the younger characters, which arrives like an obligation and drains the tension built around the ship and the war. Stone trusts silence and stillness, and the trust mostly pays off. This is a handsome, restrained picture about mortality and the urge to matter after death. It does not reach for more than it can hold, and it holds what it reaches for.