Josh O’Connor’s best movie this year is not Challengers (2024)

Josh O'Connor is having an outstanding year in cinemas, with the excellent Challengers being the most talked-about movie of the season.

However, The Crown star is leading another movie this year which is perhaps not as sexy and sweaty as Luca Guadagino's, but it's unmistakably one of the best movies of 2024 — La Chimera is a spellbinding masterpiece that deserves all your attention.

Creating its own Fellini-esque daydream, Alice Rohrwacher's movie wanders through a land that feels stranded somewhere between the living and the dead, the past and the present, one person's obsession and an entire country's miseries.

It's the kind of movie you would gladly get lost in.

O'Connor plays Arthur, an Englishman working alongside a band of grave robbers (known as tombaroli) in 1980s Italy. Beyond his archeological knowledge, his gift is somewhat supernatural, as he is able to sense the presence of underground burial chambers that have remained hidden for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years.

With these discoveries of highly coveted Etruscan art, Arthur is paying back a substantial debt while obsessing over his disappeared girlfriend Beniamina.

At the start of the movie, he is coming back from serving time in jail for grave-robbing (an illegal activity he immediately resumes upon arrival), as he regularly visits his patron and Beniamina's grandmother Flora (played by icon Isabella Rossellini), whose life is as decayed as the ancient building she insists on living in.

In all his grumpiness and enigmatic energy, Arthur is a man grieving a loss he is not yet ready to accept. A man walking among ghosts he calls memories.

One of the most alluring aspects of La Chimera is how it feels alive and untamed.

From the warm portrayal of the charismatic grave robbers (who can dig a hole in the ground as efficiently as they dress up for a euphoric street parade in town) to the bickering women in Flora's family (who are eager to ransack the matriarch's home like they are grave robbers themselves), this modern fable breathes the same spontaneity and deliciously chaotic energy one would expect to find in a small Mediterranean village.

Among the endearing picaresque criminals, O'Connor's moody archeologist and the occasional shadows of a long-lost past, the beating heart in the story ends up being Carol Duarte's Italia, a pious single mother who turns an abandoned train station into a shelter for women. As she says, the place belongs to nobody, so it belongs to everybody.

With characters reclaiming the collective wealth in a changing Italy that's falling into the clutches of global capitalism, the movie pieces together a fascinating mosaic of working-class chimeras — hopes of prosperity that are unlikely to come true, as life is led by the rules of survival.

Following the critically-acclaimed Happy as Lazzaro, Alice Rohrwacher continues to thread captivating stories that feel like folk tales, echoing the masters of Italian neorealism (from Roberto Rossellini to Pier Paolo Pasolini) while creating something utterly unique that reverberates in our present-day reality.

Josh O'Connor delivers an impressive performance as the broody foreigner lost in time and trapped in grief. After embodying the shameless rake Patrick Zweig in Challengers, the actor finds a world of emotions in small gestures and longing looks. He is our guide in this dingy Wonderland of eccentric characters impossible to categorise.

There is a duality to all the movie's themes and people, which in Arthur's case is brilliantly displayed by showing him upside down like the Tarot's hanged man (a card referenced in one of the posters). Much like these mystic cards, La Chimera holds many meanings, and it's up to viewers to explore them all or simply surrender to its beautiful spell.

La Chimera is now out in UK cinemas.