Living

Oliver Hermanus's Living premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival in the Premieres section and adapts Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru (1952), itself loosely drawn from Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich. The screenplay is by the Nobel Laureate Kazuo Ishiguro, who set the action in post-war London and conceived the project specifically as a vehicle for Bill Nighy. It is Hermanus's first English-language feature after the South African dramas Shirley Adams, Beauty and Moffie, and a UK-Sweden co-production through Number 9 Films and Film i Väst.

Nighy leads as Mr Williams, with Aimee Lou Wood (Sex Education) as his young colleague Margaret, Alex Sharp as the new recruit Peter and Tom Burke as a London man-about-town. Cinematographer Jamie Ramsay (a frequent Hermanus collaborator) shoots the film on Super 16 in the boxy 1.37:1 Academy ratio, sourcing wardrobe and credit-sequence design from period Ealing-era English cinema. Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch's score is sparing and string-led; Sandy Powell designed the costumes.

The film received Academy Award nominations for Best Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay (Ishiguro) and BAFTA nominations in the same two categories plus Outstanding British Film, with Nighy adding a Golden Globe nomination and the BIFA prize. Reviewers in The Guardian, The New Yorker and Sight & Sound praised Nighy's pared-down, almost geological performance. The film became one of the most successful British prestige releases of the year, and is now widely cited as the rare Kurosawa transposition that finds an idiom of its own.