La Chimera Film [ Premium 2026 ]

Rohrwacher shoots this world in two registers. The sun-drenched surface—full of squabbling thieves, pasta dinners, and a chorus of middle-aged women singing off-key—is rendered in warm, grainy 16mm. It is chaotic, earthy, and alive. But when Arthur dips his rod and feels the pull of a buried chamber, the film cuts to 35mm, and the colors bleed into dream. The subterranean world is quiet, solemn, and full of the dead. Rohrwacher does not moralize about the grave robbing; she treats the tombs as libraries, and the tombaroli as illiterate poets who know the price of everything but the value of nothing.

It is a strange, beautiful, and devastating film—a folk tale about capitalism, colonialism, and heartbreak, where the real treasure is the permission to stop digging. La Chimera Film

Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera opens not with a bang, but with a tug. Arthur Harari’s protagonist, the lanky, disheveled Arthur (Josh O’Connor), is yanked back from the brink of the afterlife by a frayed piece of string. He lands on a mattress in a dusty train depot, and we realize we are watching a film about verticality: the pull of the underworld versus the weight of the sun. Rohrwacher shoots this world in two registers

The chimera of the title is the impossible dream—the thing you chase that doesn’t exist. For Arthur, it is literal: a statue of a mythological creature he once saw in a tomb, and the ghost of his lost love, Beniamina. He is a broken English archaeologist with a supernatural gift for finding the dead, yet he cannot find his own way out of grief. Every stolen vase and sarcophagus is a failed substitution for the woman he couldn’t save. But when Arthur dips his rod and feels

On its surface, La Chimera is a heist movie for antiquarians. Set in 1980s Tuscany, it follows a gang of eccentric tombaroli (tomb raiders) who use dowsing rods to locate lost Etruscan graves, plundering them for artifacts to sell on the black market. But Rohrwacher has no interest in the thrill of the score. She is interested in the hole left behind.