Living (2022)

Bill Nighy is Oscar-nominated for Best Actor as Mr. Williams, the numb head of a 1950s Public Works office in London. He's great, the movie is sad, but very good. Among the cast, Alex Sharp and Aimee Lou Wood as his compassionate co-workers and Tom Burke as a sympathetic stranger stand out.

Oliver Hermanus directs from the script by Kazuo Ishiguro, who adapted the screenplay from the 1952 movie Ikiru, which was directed and co-written by the seminal filmmaker Akira Kurosawa and co-written by Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni. And that movie was inspired by Leo Tolstoy's 1886 novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich. The pacing is a bit slow, but that's just right for this story.

Apparently Ishiguru had hoped for many years to adapt Ikiru and attach Nighy to the project, and his dream came true when he shared a taxi with Nighy and told him about it.

Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch's lovely soundtrack can be found on Apple Music and Helen Scott's production design keeps this period piece firmly set in its decade. The filmmakers used vintage footage in many scenes.

Nighy was last blogged for The Bookshop plus a cameo in Emma. and Sharp for How to Talk to Girls at Parties. Wood is best known to me for 25 episodes in the ensemble of Sex Education. This is Hermanus' fifth feature. 

Ishiguro's credits include two other feature screenplays and six adaptations of his novels, two of which are the mini-series and movie based on Never Let Me Go. Levienaise-Farrouch is new to me but this score just won the Hollywood Music in media Award for Best original Score - Independent Film. I haven't written about Scott before but her previous work includes Fish Tank, the aforementioned How to Talk to Girls at Parties, and Small Axe.

Rotten Tomatoes' critics are alive and well with an average of 96% and its audiences close behind at 87. Eager to see it before the Oscars on March 12, we rented it on the first day, March 3, that it became available on Apple TV/iTunes.