La | Chimera

Josh O’Connor delivers a restrained, magnetic performance; Arthur is at once vulnerable and stubborn, a man whose interior life surfaces mostly through looks and silences. Isabella Rossellini brings gravitas and grace to Benedetta, an ambivalent figure who offers mentorship, tenderness, and ambiguity. The supporting cast — including veterans from Italian cinema and a roster of local characters — enrich the film’s communal texture.

Watch for the color red. It is the thread of Ariadne guiding us through this labyrinth. The red string on Arthur’s dowsing rod. The red feathers on a hat. The red paint on a wall. Red is the color of life, of menstrual blood, of the umbilical cord. It is the connection between Italy’s ancient matriarchal roots and the present.

Isabella Rossellini plays Flora, a former opera singer and the mother of the lost Beniamina. Her home is a chaotic ruin filled with peacocks and piano keys. She represents the crumbling aristocracy, but also the memory of the woman Arthur cannot find. Their relationship is tender and traumatic—a mother grieving a daughter, a lover refusing to finish mourning. La Chimera

What makes La Chimera so profound is its treatment of the past. In a modern world of concrete apartment blocks and sterile train stations, the Etruscan tombs are cathedrals of color and life. When Arthur breaks through the dirt into a sealed tomb, the camera lingers on the frescoes—vivid paintings of banquets, dancers, and blue demons. The dead, Rohrwacher suggests, lived better than we do.

But there is a moral weight here. The film asks a difficult question: Can you love the past while destroying it? Arthur respects the dead; he takes off his shoes before entering a tomb. Yet he is a conduit for the desecration of their rest. The black market dealer (Isabella Rossellini, fierce and regal) buys the stolen artifacts to adorn the walls of the wealthy, severing the objects from their souls. Watch for the color red

The film never preaches. Instead, it presents a magical realism where the dead have agency. In a stunning final act, the artifacts literally revolt. They cannot be possessed. They can only be borrowed, and eventually, they will return to the earth—or pull you down with them.

The soundtrack emphasizes ambient sound and sparse music, augmenting the film’s contemplative mood. Moments of diegetic music and silence punctuate emotional beats, letting landscapes and faces speak. The red feathers on a hat

The story follows Arthur (Josh O'Connor), a young British archaeologist and scholar of Etruscan antiquities. Arthur possesses a special, almost supernatural gift: he is a "tombarolo," a grave robber who can sense the presence of ancient tombs underground using a dowsing rod. He can "sing" the earth into revealing its secrets.

At the beginning of the film, Arthur is released from prison. Disheveled and heartbroken, he returns to a small town in Tuscany. He is grieving the loss of his great love, Beniamina, an Italian woman who has recently died under mysterious circumstances. Arthur moves into the dilapidated home of Beniamina’s mother, Flora (Isabella Rossellini), a faded aristocrat living in poverty.

While Flora hopes Arthur will use his education to tutor her daughter’s children, Arthur instead reconnects with a ragtag group of local tombaroli. They lead chaotic, noisy expeditions to dig up Etruscan artifacts, which they sell on the black market to a corrupt art dealer named Spartaco. Arthur participates not for the money, but out of a desperate need to be close to the earth and the past, feeling closer to Beniamina in the silence of the tombs.

The narrative takes a turn when Arthur meets Italia (Carol Duarte), a Brazilian singer and migrant worker living in a shantytown nearby who bears a striking resemblance to the lost Beniamina. Italia challenges Arthur's obsession with the past. She is vibrant, alive, and struggling for a future, contrasting sharply with Arthur's morbid desire to stay buried in history.