La Chimera -
La Chimera is not a movie about answers. It is a movie about the holes we dig in search of them. It is a prayer for the missing, a love letter to the soil, and a warning to those who cannot stop staring at the rearview mirror.
Perhaps the Chimera is not a monster to be slain, but a part of us—the part that insists there is something else beneath the surface. Whether you come to La Chimera for Josh O’Connor’s raw performance, the breathtaking cinematography, or the haunting score by Apparat, you will leave with dirt under your fingernails and a tear in your eye.
Go see the Chimera. Just don’t try to bring her home.
Keywords used: La Chimera, Alice Rohrwacher, Josh O’Connor, Etruscan, tomb raiders, film review, streaming, mythology, 2023 film, Italian cinema.
At the center of La Chimera is Arthur (played with raw, physical vulnerability by Josh O’Connor), a British misfit living in rural Italy during the 1980s. Arthur possesses a strange, inexplicable talent: dowsing. Using a simple bent twig, he can sense the presence of buried Etruscan tombs beneath the Italian soil. La Chimera
Arthur is a tombarolo—a grave robber. He leads a ragtag band of fellow outcasts across the countryside, digging illegal tunnels to unearth priceless ancient vases, statues, and sarcophagi, which they then sell on the black market. But Arthur isn’t interested in the money. He hoards his share of the loot not to get rich, but to search for something specific: a doorway. He is looking for a path to the underworld, driven by the hope of reuniting with his lost love, Beniamina.
This tragic motivation transforms La Chimera from a simple crime drama into a profound meditation on grief. For Arthur, every illicit dig is an act of desperation. He violates the earth not for greed, but for love.
La Chimera feels like a dream you wake from and immediately try to return to. Rohrwacher uses time strangely. Characters pause mid-sentence. The world tilts. The score (by the experimental group La Tarma) blends whistles, industrial clangs, and folk songs.
By the time Arthur makes his final descent into the earth—not to steal, but to stay—you realize the film has pulled a sleight of hand. This was never a crime caper. It was a ghost story. It is a film about how we are all tombaroli in our own way, digging through memory, trying to resurrect a moment that has turned to dust. La Chimera is not a movie about answers
One of the most striking features of La Chimera is its visual texture. Shot by cinematographer Hélène Louvart on 35mm film and 16mm, the picture shifts between two distinct ratios. The "real" world—the fields, the train station, the market—is shot in a boxy, Academy ratio (1.33:1), evoking a cramped, post-war neorealist feel.
But when Arthur dips his toe into the underworld, or when he uses his dowsing rod to find a tomb, the frame expands to widescreen. The colors bleed. The camera seems to float. Rohrwacher uses this technical trick to suggest that the subterranean realm of the dead is actually larger and freer than the world of the living. The past is not behind us; it is directly beneath us, waiting to break through.
This physicality extends to the performances. Josh O’Connor shuffles through the film wearing a rumpled white linen suit and a permanent slouch. He is a man pulled down by gravity, a living corpse. In contrast, the women of the film—particularly Italy (Carol Duarte), a music teacher with a powerful voice, and Flora (Isabella Rossellini), Beniamina’s aristocratic mother—are grounded and solid. They represent the future and the acceptance of loss.
Unlike Rome or Greece, the Etruscan civilization is often forgotten. They were the precursors to the Roman Empire, a mysterious people whose language remains largely untranslated. La Chimera treats the Etruscans as the ultimate "Other." The art looted in the film is not just treasure; it is the physical evidence of a silenced culture. Keywords used: La Chimera
In a poignant subplot, Arthur meets Italia (Carol Duarte), a young mother living in the ruins of a half-finished building. She is everything the tombaroli are not: she builds, rather than digs; she creates life, rather than extracting death. Through Italia, Arthur begins to understand that chasing the Chimera—the lost woman, the past glory—is futile. The dead are dead. The only true rebellion is to live in the present.
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.
Rohrwacher favors long, deliberate takes, naturalistic performances, and a near-poetic visual language. The cinematography (by Hélène Louvart) bathes ruins, fields, and interiors in a warm, tactile light, making the physical landscape feel like another character. The pacing is meditative, allowing small gestures and textures to accrue emotional weight. Rohrwacher’s direction balances realism with a faintly surreal or fable-like tone, creating an atmosphere that’s at once intimate and mythic.
