Living

"Bill Nighy tackles life and death in exquisitely sad drama" - The Guardian ★★★★★

Adapted from the beloved Japanese classic film from director Akira Kurosawa, and with a script by Remains of the Day author Kazuo Ishigiru, LIVING is a profound drama that sees star Bill Nighy deliver an acting masterclass.

In a grey 1950s Britain recovering from war, A buttoned-up civil servant (Nighy) works joylessly in the town planning department; he is a lonely widower estranged from his son and daughter-in-law. Approaching retirement, his supposed reward for a life of pointless tedium, Mr Williams receives a stomach-cancer diagnosis with one year to live. And now he realises that he has been dead until this moment. After a mad and undignified attempt at boozy debauchery in the company of a louche writer (Tom Burke), Mr Williams realises there is one thing he might still achieve: getting the city authorities to somehow build the modest little children’s playground for which local mothers have been desperately petitioning and which he and his colleagues have been smugly preventing with their bureaucratic inertia.