La Chimera Beautifully Reckons with How Grief Traps Us as Prisoners of the Past

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In a year dominated by legacy sequels (Gladiator II, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, etc.) and long-awaited big screen adaptations (Dune: Part Two, Wicked: Part I), Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera became an unexpected hit in its own right. The film became Rohrwacher’s most successful feature film to date after it played for an incredible six months at New York’s beloved IFC Center (for comparison, the film played for a measly three days at the local cinema in my hometown in Manchester, England), earning the title of the longest run the Center has seen in a decade. It turns out that for many of NYC’s film lovers, a sleepy, existential film about how death echoes in the living was the perfect antidote to the high octane, CGI-heavy movies that are usually on offer in multiplexes today.

Set in a rather dusty-looking Tuscany in the 1980s, La Chimera follows British looter Arthur (Josh O’Connor) who, after being released from prison, immediately returns to a life of tomb robbing while processing the loss of his girlfriend, Beniamina (Yile Vianello). Arthur and his fellow tomb robbers, or “tombaroli,” are part of a network of sellers who partake in the illicit trade of rare Etruscan artifacts. It’s only when he meets Italia (Carol Duarte), a student and live-in maid for Beniamina’s mother Flora (Isabella Rossellini), that Arthur’s way of living is brought into question.

Much of the film is spent watching Arthur wander from gravesite to gravesite, using a mythical twig to help guide him to the treasures buried underground. He is said to have a “gift of finding lost things,” and he uses this gift to locate tombs full of priceless artefacts while being haunted by the memory of Beniamina. We aren’t immediately told that she is dead, or even what happened to her—in fact, we aren’t given definitive confirmation of Beniamina’s death until three quarters of the way into the film—but her presence is a specter that haunts the narrative, her face quite literally appearing in flashes from Arthur’s memory. Flora’s unwavering belief that her daughter will one day return is matched only by Arthur’s irrational, never-ending search for Beniamina’s presence in every tomb he invades. In their shared grief, the two fight to keep her memory alive, even at the cost of their own sanity.

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Arthur is often seen sulking through each frame in a dirty white linen suit, his hair a mess and his face set into a permanent scowl. He lives in a ramshackle home with no heating or electricity and visits Flora often. Flora’s children take umbrage with Arthur’s constant presence in their mother’s home, but they cannot sever a bond built by the shared love of Beniamina. Flora is the only one who will indulge Arthur in his own fantasies of Beniamina returning as she holds onto the same hope. Their bond is a bittersweet example of community built through grief; though the world moves on around them, Flora and Arthur remain tied to the past in their search for their beloved Beniamina.

Community is a central preoccupation of La Chimera, and Rohrwacher explores the hurdles that stand in its way. She singles out a capitalistic society as a central evil that encourages individualism over community, and Arthur’s career of choice acts as the perfect vehicle through which to explore this. When Arthur and his fellow tombaroli bring the decapitated head of a priceless statue to an auction on board a ship (where the body of said statue is being sold), the animalistic nature of this cycle of stealing for profit is brought to the foreground. The auctioneer and the grave robbers growl at each other like feral dogs as they argue over money in exchange for the artefact. Rohrwacher erases the distance between buyer and seller and emphasizes how the entire practice of selling for profit makes animals of us all. When Arthur is asked to reveal the statue’s head to the auctioneer so she can verify its authenticity, he initially agrees but is suddenly struck by the majesty of the object in his hands. He caresses the statue’s face, whispers “You’re not made for human eyes,”—a warning that Italia gave him about removing things that are meant to remain buried—and then throws the head overboard.

By tearing this precious artefact away from the clutches of these feral dealers, who care only for profit and not for the majesty of the items they handle, Arthur aims to correct his errant behavior. Though he is often shown handling the artefacts he finds with more care than his fellow tombaroli, this is the first time that he has shown any real respect for the objects. For a brief moment, it seems as though he has heeded Italia’s warning. This feeling of hope only flourishes as Arthur reunites with Italia in the abandoned train station where she has built a small community with other single mothers. The women ponder over the role that Arthur can play in their lives—they joke that he can cook, clean, and serve as their maid—before they allow him to stay the night. He and Italia share a kiss, and in their embrace lies the promise of a different future for Arthur away from the overwhelming grief of his past.

Yet when morning comes, he slips away and finds himself searching through graves for Beniamina once more. When he finds himself accidentally trapped inside a tomb, Arthur first ventures further in the darkness before being brought to a stop by a red thread dangling over his head and a single stream of light pouring down from a gap in the ground above. He closes his eyes and takes a breath as he imagines himself following the thread back to Beniamina and holding her in his arms once more. Forsaking the future for a memory of the past, Arthur succumbs to his grief and finds peace in a vision that reunites him with his lost love.

When watching Arthur embrace grief with open arms, I was reminded of Joan Didion’s words in her memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, where she wrote about the many ways in which grief can keep us prisoners to the past. Didion described the understandable desire to keep the dead alive “in order to keep them with us” but asserted that “if we are to live ourselves, there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.” Arthur refuses to keep Beniamina dead, even more so to live without her, and so grief traps him in time, freezing him in the memory of his past. As a film that luxuriates in the empty spaces between action and dialogue, this final moment of silent catharsis encapsulates the beauty at the heart of this picture. Rohrwacher takes the theory of the “red thread of fate”—an East Asian belief that there is an invisible red string tied around the fingers of those destined to meet and fall in love—and weaves a tragic tale of grief and love around it to explore the fleeting nature of life.

At a runtime of two hours and thirteen minutes, La Chimera is a film that is made to be digested slowly, each frame crafted in a way that allows us to linger on every minute detail. As one of the quieter releases of the year (people were more likely to have watched O’Connor in Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers this year), Rohrwacher’s film nearly slipped under the radar, but managed to leave its mark on audiences willing to take a moment to sit still and contemplate the ephemeral nature of life. When compared to the myriad blockbuster films of 2024, the relative success of a somber film about a grieving tomb robber is proof of a desire for something strange and quiet to balance out the noise of the Hollywood machine.

Nadira Begum is a freelance film critic and culture writer based in the UK. To see her talk endlessly about film, TV, and her love of vampires, you can follow her on Twitter (@nadirawrites) or Instagram (@iamnadirabegum).