Living film review — Bill Nighy seizes the day in Kazuo Ishiguro’s rewrite of Kurosawa

Akira Kurosawa’s quiet, supple drama Ikiru, inspired in part by Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, was well received on its release in 1952 and has only grown in stature since. This remake — Living, directed by Oliver Hermanus (Moffie) and with script by novelist Kazuo Ishiguro — doesn’t look likely to achieve the same status. That said, it is the sort of highly crafted, intensely calculated kind of middlebrow-that-thinks-it’s-highbrow fare that wins awards. That goes especially for its star Bill Nighy, an actor better known for comedy work who turns down the volume sufficiently while broadcasting on the right dramatic frequencies to attract voting bodies.

Nighy plays Mr Williams, a man so encased in propriety he barely seems to have a first name. Maybe it’s Mister? This is England in the early 1950s, and every day the civil servant rides the commuter train to Waterloo station and walks to County Hall where he supervises a planning department that’s part of a much larger, inefficient bureaucracy.

But when Williams finds out he has cancer and only months to live, he decides to carpe that diem and live it up a bit for once, albeit in a manner still befitting a repressed middle-aged man of the time. He goes to Brighton and enjoys a drunken night out with Tom Burke’s bohemian stranger and, later, initiates a chaste friendship with a bubbly former colleague, Miss Harris (Aimee Lou Wood, luminous). This subplot plays rather differently now than in the Kurosawa film, the film-makers labouring to make it less icky by giving Harris a beau her own age.

Ishiguro and Co have wisely stayed true to Ikiru’s tricksy narrative structure, which tempers the sentimentality of the story’s last act. The minutely observed rendering of the period atmosphere, from the de-saturated cinematography to the sharp tailoring on the men’s suits, is a treat as well, like a ride on a swing on a snowy day.

★★★☆☆

In UK cinemas from November 4