Film reviews: Living | Hunt | Watcher | Something in the Dirt

Cast as a pen-pusher suddenly confronted with his own mortality, Bill Nighy delivers an understated yet precise performance in Oliver Hermanus’s Living, writes Alistair Harkness

Bill Nighy in Living PIC: Ross Ferguson

Living (12A) ***

Hunt (15) ****

Watcher (15) ****

Something in the Dirt (15) ****

A minor key melodrama about the quiet desperation of a joyless civil servant suddenly forced to confront his own mortality, Living provides Bill Nighy with a rare leading role, albeit one somewhat undercut by the film’s stilted approach to his character’s existential awakening. Adapted from Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film Ikiru by Nobel Prize-winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro and South African director Oliver Hermanus (Moffie), the new film transposes Kurosawa’s contemporary story to London in the same period, thus allowing Ishiguro and Hermanus to more easily preserve the deferential social codes of the original amid the buttoned-down, stiff-upper-lipped city gents of the immediate post-war era.

Nighy’s Mr Williams is one such city gent, a pen-pusher in the council’s public works department whose dedication to bureaucratic inaction has seemingly consumed his life. The comforting dullness of his routine is so extreme that when he’s diagnosed with a terminal illness, not only is he shocked into reckoning with the fact that he’s wasted his adult life doing pointless work, he’s also forced to confront the fact that he doesn’t even know how to begin making the most of his remaining days. He gets a brief crash course in the latter from a seaside encounter with a lascivious writer (Tom Burke) who takes him on a nighttime bender. But really it’s his growing infatuation with a young female co-worker (Aimee Lou Wood), who’s had the gumption to jack-in her dull office job, that spurs him into taking some kind of action.

Ironically these scenes themselves lack life. Hermanus has a tendency to treat the period setting like it’s a museum exhibit, rendering everything so tastefully and exquisitely that the stultifying existence Williams is trying to escape instead suffocates the film as a whole. What Living does have going for it is Nighy. Whether he’s restricting his voice to a hoarse whisper or giving his head a slight bow whenever Williams encounters a superior, Nighy’s performance is understated yet precise, capturing the complicated nature of a man who’s lived his life like a cross between George Bailey and Scrooge.

Hunt

Now that Hollywood has pretty much given up making action movies that don’t feature superheroes, where’s a film fan to go when they want insanely violent fist fights, assassination attempts going haywire and characters reversing vehicles at high speed into the middle of a gun battle? The answer is Squid Game star Lee Jung-jae’s directorial debut Hunt, a South Korean political thriller that takes the spy-vs-spy premise of The Departed/Infernal Affairs and amps it up with peak John Woo-style carnage. Set against the escalating Cold War paranoia and violent student uprisings of early 1980s Korea, the film takes a frenetic and fanciful approach to the times with a story built around a presidential assassination plot involving a North Korean mole infiltrating the Korean Central Intelligence Agency. In an effort to root said mole out, the agency’s corrupt and ineffectual director orders the heads of the KCIA’s foreign and domestic units to investigate each other, which pinballs frenemies Pyung-ho (Lee) and Jung-do (Jung Woo-sung) into a savage battle of wills. Chaos and bloodshed reign supreme as Lee punctuates the hard-hitting, beautifully orchestrated action with an increasingly convoluted plot that serves up more twists than a bowl of noodles. Does it all make sense? Perhaps. Does it really matter if it doesn't? When the action is this visceral and entertaining, not one bit.

The spectre of #MeToo hangs over Watcher like a fine mist, never explicitly mentioned, but lingering in the details of American director Chloe Akuno’s smart thriller about a young woman (Maika Monroe) who relocates to Bucharest with her husband (Karl Glusman) only to find herself feeling isolated and alone when she suspects a neighbour of spying on her. Akuno is especially good here at creating an air of unease, frequently using shallow focus to keep us in her protagonist’s headspace by isolating Monroe’s Julia within the frame and obscuring what we can see around her (she also uses the large windows of Julia’s apartment to great effect to show us how exposed she really is). But is Julia imagining things or is her panic justified? The film keeps the answer ambiguous for a while with news reports of a spate of recent killings functioning as both a potential trigger for some other trauma – an abandoned career as an actress is ominously hinted at – and a plausible reason to be scared. The film, though, isn’t about to sell Julia out. Even as it starts embracing some of the genre tropes familiar from classics such as Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby, it offers a fresh take on how those ideas sit in the current moment and singles Akuno out as a filmmaker to watch.

Indie mavericks Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead (Synchronic, The Endless) return with Something in the Dirt, an ultra lo-fi, ultra-weird sci-fi mystery. Conceived and shot during the various lockdowns, the film channels the strangeness of that period into a tale of fracturing realities, dingbat conspiraciy theories and obsessive behaviour in which new neighbours John (Benson) and Levi (Moorhead) discover an interdimensional anomaly in the former’s apartment and proceed to make a documentary about their efforts to figure out what it means. Part found-footage horror, part cosmic freak-out, part riff on the creative process, it brings to mind other LA-based head-scratchers like Under the Silver Lake and Mulholland Drive, but its scrappy DIY aesthetic and swing-for-the-fences storytelling give it a punky energy all its own.

Living, Watcher and Something in the Dirt are exclusively in cinemas from 4 November; Hunt is in cinemas and on digital demand from 4 November.