Wealthy widow Edith Pretty is convinced that treasures lie beneath the surface of burial mounds on her Sutton Hoo estate. With the Second World War beckoning, she hires amateur archaeologist Basil Brown to excavate the site and he makes a historic discovery: an Anglo-Saxon ship burial.
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.
| role | name |
|---|---|
| Edith Pretty | Carey Mulligan |
| Basil Brown | Ralph Fiennes |
| Peggy Piggott | Lily James |
| Rory Lomax | Johnny Flynn |
| Stuart Piggott | Ben Chaplin |
| Charles Phillips | Ken Stott |
| May Brown | Monica Dolan |
| William Grimes | Arsher Ali |
| role | name |
|---|---|
| Director | Simon Stone |
