I watched this on the 3rd of June, 2024, at the independent cinema. Honestly? Little mid. The shots were very pretty, and I loved some of the reverence to the archaeological finds, but the plot was middling, and Josh O’Connor, while pretty, has a limited expressive range and it’s impossible to tell what he’s thinking, which, if deployed artfully, can be useful and interesting, but here was just alienating.
Back up a little - the movie’s about a British archaeologist (O’Connor) in the 80s who falls in with a bunch of graverobbers in Italy, digging up and selling Etruscan artefacts on the black market. Less than a plot, it’s a slice-of-life type thing. There’s some magical realism in that he uses dowsing to find the graves, plus he gets visions (chimeras) near them, but other than that it’s limited. There were some very nice moments - his flowering romance with the female lead, who pulls off a Pride-and-Prejudice style arc from icky to hmmm she’s nice I guess, plus the unexpected part at the end where he’s buried in a tomb but finds a string leading him to his dead girlfriend.
However, these nice parts are overshadowed by the sheer meh-ness of it all. The plot doesn’t grip, the characters aren’t particularly likeable, and I’ve seen better blends of magic and confusion. One of my friends liked it though, I’ll have to ask for his perspective.