The Dig

Ralph Fiennes and Carey Mulligan bring a lot of heart to this drama about the excavation of an Anglo-Saxon burial ship in Suffolk in 1938. Upper-class widow Edith Pretty (Mulligan) invites working-class archaeologist Basil Brown (Fiennes) to excavate the grassy mounds on the edge of her Sutton Hoo estate. He's a self-taught, no-nonsense man of few words while she's a pleasant yet melancholy mother, in an increasingly fragile state, trying to do right by her son and her own legacy. Brown and Pretty's odd-couple united front against the elements and pompous historical organisations is engaging to watch, but a romantic subplot involving Lily James and Ben Chaplin is an unwelcome distraction. The Dig offers an interesting insight into a plot of British archaeological history, but it could have dug deeper into Brown's story.