Sundance 2022 Film Review

One of the first titles out of the block at this year’s Sundance looks as British as you can get. But its bowler hat and stiff upper lip disguise unexpected origins and surprising ambition.

Set in 1950s London, Living has Bill Nighy as Mr Williams (we never learn his first name) as the buttoned up head of department at County Hall, ground down by the soulless mundanity and process of the job. As the prospect of retirement – and more tedium – in the Surrey suburbs beckons, he’s diagnosed with cancer. The knowledge of having just months left brings him to the realisation that he’s never really lived at all and, after a boozy night out with dissolute writer, Sutherland (Tom Burke), he realises there’s one thing he might achieve before his time is up, something that would both fly in the face of the cloying bureaucracy which has dogged him for years and be his personal legacy.

The film is a re-working of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 Ikiru (which means “to live”), which the director always cited as his favourite film. Apparently it’s top of Spielberg’s list as well, so props to director Oliver Hermanus for having the ambition and sheer nerve to take on such a classic. His choice of screenwriter is perfection: Kazuo Ishiguro, with his inherent understanding of British reserve that comes straight from his own Japanese heritage. He’s on familiar ground with the restraint and rigidity in the world of Living, and keeps deviations from the original to a minimum. While Ikiru had a contemporary setting, Ishiguro shifts it to London in the mid-50s, with its legions of male office workers in their pin striped suits and bowler hats, occupying the same seat every day on the daily commute, while women colleagues were a rarity, more likely to look after the home and worry about the latest gossip.

Making good use of archive footage, the film becomes something of a period piece, with the drab greens and browns of the day, and only the occasional splash of colour, usually courtesy of the sympathetic Miss Harris (Sex Education’s Aimee Lou Wood). Her zest for life, the unintentional sharpness of her nick-name for Williams and his platonic infatuation with her – which scandalises his daughter-in-law – coax him out of his shell. In a transformation that’s best symbolised by the change of hat from a bowler to a trilby, Nighy gives an almost unbearably tender performance, a cripplingly shy man stifled by a job that means nothing to him, yet ironically has the power to profoundly affect the lives of others.

The bittersweet tone of the film mellows in the final sequences, drawing to a conclusion with a moving shot of Nighy as we so often see him, in profile and alone, but this time smiling despite the freezing cold snow. Regardless of your age, Hermanus’s contemplative film will make you reflect on your attitudes to life. Do we really have to wait for an ultimate deadline to live life to the full? We may shed a tear for Mr Williams in what is a sad film but, like him, we will leave with a smile.