A haunting film, with a strong vein of anarchic comedy, about our connections to the past and how the living feed off the dead, both financially and emotionally. It combines Italian neorealism and the Gothic in a manner distinctive of Alice Rohrwacher’s cinema. It also forms the final part of a loose trilogy, including The Wonders (2014) and Happy as Lazarro (2018), that explore the intersection of personal and collective memory and the role of myth.

Arthur, played by Josh O’Connor, is an expatriate British archaeologist now reduced to a tombarolo (grave robber) in 1980s Italy. His knack for dowsing Etruscan graves, and his tendency towards visions, make him both indisensable to the otherwise inept gang of tombaroli but also set him apart as a liminal character forever teetering between dreams and reality, and between the living and the dead.

The story’s common thread, both literally and figuratively, is Arthur’s search for his missing former girlfriend, Beniamina, widely presumed to have died. There are echoes of Orpheus and Eurydice, but the film also engages squarely with the political economy of a country monetising its own past for the benefit of international capital and in its treatment of migrants such as the symbolically named Italia, a Brazilian single mother that Arthur begins to have feelings for.

“The tension between character and actor is fascinating. O’Connor’s boyishness is enough for those around Arthur to take him for charming. But something else is always at work, his scowl at odds with his screwball colleagues. Rohrwacher has a great eye for actors’ faces. She also puts pointedly playful quote marks around her story.” Danny Leigh, Financial Times.

“Alice Rohrwacher’s new film is a beguiling fantasy-comedy of lost love: garrulous, uproarious and celebratory in her absolutely distinctive style. It’s a movie bustling and teeming with life, with characters fighting, singing, thieving and breaking the fourth wall to address us directly.” Peter Bradshaw, Guardian.