The new Netflix release is graceful, honest, and subtle.

This weekend's Netflix release, The Dig, is ostensibly a retelling of the excavation of Sutton Hoo. But much like the Anglo-Saxon burial ship discovered there, the film quickly reveals itself to be a vessel for the past, with all its strange, sweet, sad reminders of the fragility of life, and the ways it lingers on. 

The Dig, directed by Simon Stone, written by Moira Buffini, and shot by Mike Eley, stars all the heavy-hitting British actors you could hope for: top-billed Carey Mulligan, Ralph Fiennes, Lily James, Johnny Flynn, Ken Stott, Ben Chaplain. For all their collective star power, however, there are no Oscar-hopeful speeches, no dramatic transformations. (You may read about Ralph Fiennes's acting as such—it is instead subtle and honest.) Each actor is beautifully, graciously, carefully in service of the story and atmosphere. Every element of the film is, in fact. 

From the script to the cinematography, The Dig is a gentle, hazy meditation on death and how we live with it. Director Simon Stone said, "I loved the challenge of how to make this an unconventional period thriller, to ask, “what's going to happen?" and “what will they discover?” and “is the war coming?” and at the same time to make it an elegiac, poetic, longing film, tinged in sadness."

To achieve that, Buffini's script, bolstered by Stone's bold direction, confidently ignores the typical beats of many in its genre, those well-meaning based-on-a-true-story stories. The classic story arc is in there somewhere, with its stops and sputters—wrenches thrown in the gears of the excavation and the lives of our characters. But The Dig, with its almost montage-like pacing and its consistent and unusual use of vaguely extratemporal voiceover, moves past them with grace. Scenes shift and bleed into one another like the morning Suffolk mist, "trying," as Johnny Flynn's character says, "to fix things as they go past." And while on occasion I would have liked to sit in a scene, it is mostly for the best that The Dig shifts and flows as it does. Even as I was watching, this film already felt like a memory—landscapes and faces out a car window somewhere in our collective past.

The Dig is a memento mori—an objet d'art that points with patience towards The End. It is a true story that has all the hallmarks of deliberate, calculated fiction: a young widow discovers an Anglo-Saxon burial ship just as she is grappling with the advent of WWII, her husband's passing, her own failing health, what comes after death, and who and what she will leave behind? Really? Truth, it turns out, is more pointed than fiction. But this adaptation, for all its imagined additions, faithfully and fittingly serves the themes of the true story. As Lily James' and Johnny Flynn's characters muse—in a thousand years, what will be left of them? Metal camera parts, perhaps a shard of a mug. Of Edith Pretty and Basil Brown: a gentle, misty meditation on eternity. 

Let us know if this is your type of genre, and if so, tell us in the comments what you think about The Dig after watching it.