A quiet reckoning with time, and the courage it takes to finally use it.
Living | 2022 | 102 min
Directed by: Oliver Hermanus
Genre: Drama
There’s a particular sadness to films that don’t rush toward redemption. Living moves at the pace of paperwork, tea breaks, and afternoons that blur into one another. It opens inside routine—rows of desks, stamped files, days that feel pre-approved before they even begin. And in the middle of it all is Mr. Williams, a man who has mistaken order for purpose and restraint for living.
What unfolds isn’t a dramatic awakening, but something gentler.
- A recognition that time has been spent carefully, responsibly,and almost entirely on everyone else’s terms.
- That a life can be respectable and still feel unfinished.
Bill Nighy plays this with devastating restraint. His performance is all pauses and withheld emotion, a man learning—far too late—how little space he’s allowed himself to want anything. The film never scolds him for this. It simply observes how easy it is to disappear into function, especially when the world rewards you for it.
What stayed with me was how small the film’s idea of meaning is.
Not legacy. Not recognition.
Just a single, human act that makes a place kinder than it was before.
Adapted from a screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro, this English-language reworking of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 Ikiru—itself loosely inspired by Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich—moves with a gentle moral clarity without ever becoming instructional.
That was Piggy’s pick for what to watch this week.
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— Piggy x
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