There is a moment about halfway through Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera where the protagonist, Arthur (Josh O’Connor), stands at the edge of an illegally dug tomb. He is a tomb robber, an tombarolo , in 1980s rural Tuscany. He has a strange, almost supernatural gift: he can feel the presence of underground chambers, a dowsing rod for death. In this moment, the camera doesn’t rush. It lingers. Dust motes swim in a beam of Etruscan light. Arthur lowers himself into the darkness. He is not looking for treasure. He is looking for her .
Beniamina’s eccentric mother, who lives in a crumbling grand estate, fiercely holding onto the memories and aristocratic remnants of a bygone era.
At its core, La Chimera is a modern retelling of the ancient myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Arthur, like Orpheus, is a musician of sorts—an archaeologist whose true instrument is his divining rod—who descends into the underworld (the Etruscan tombs) in a desperate attempt to retrieve his lost love. The film constantly blurs the boundaries between the worlds of the living and the dead. The tombaroli are not merely criminals; they are intermediaries, violently breaking into the resting places of the dead to bring their treasures into the light of the modern world. Rohrwacher suggests that history is never truly buried; it is a living, breathing entity that coexists with the present, and the film questions how we bear the weight of the past while living in the now.
La Chimera centers on Arthur (played with quiet intensity by Josh O'Connor), a haunted English archaeologist living in Italy in the 1980s. Still reeling from the loss of his beloved, Beniamina, Arthur possesses an uncanny, almost supernatural ability to detect hidden Etruscan tombs, a skill that brings him into contact with a raucous group of local tombaroli (tomb robbers). La Chimera
The film explores how modern societies bear the weight of history . Rohrwacher contrasts the sacred, untouchable beauty of Etruscan art with the crass commercialism of the 1980s.
La Chimera is a quietly powerful film that lingers after viewing: a film about digging into the past to try to assemble a life. Its beauty is in the small, stubborn human moments and in Rohrwacher’s ability to make landscapes, ruins, and artifacts feel alive with memory and longing.
┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ THE DOUBLE CHIMERA OF ARTHUR │ ├───────────────────────────┬────────────────────────────┤ │ THE MATERIAL CHASE │ THE SPIRITUAL CHASE │ │ Looting Etruscan tombs │ Searching for his lost │ │ for ancient gold. │ love, Beniamina. │ └───────────────────────────┴────────────────────────────┘ Plot and Setting There is a moment about halfway through Alice
In a stunning, wordless sequence that blends live-action with stop-motion animation (a Rohrwacher signature), Arthur enters a crimson, cavernous womb. He finds Beniamina. As the rope snaps and the tunnel collapses behind him, Arthur smiles. He is finally home.
First described in Homer's Iliad , the Chimera was a monstrous, fire-breathing hybrid creature of Lycia, possessing the body of a lion, a head of a goat protruding from its back, and a snake for a tail.
: The title refers to a chimera —an unattainable wish or illusion. For Arthur, this is his desperate longing to reunite with his lost love, Beniamina. In this moment, the camera doesn’t rush
In literature, (1990) is a seminal historical novel by Sebastiano Vassalli. It reimagines the true story of Antonia, a 17th-century foundling in a Piedmontese village who is eventually tried and executed for witchcraft.
Uses physical film stocks to craft an earthy, tactile atmosphere that makes the dust, soil, and sunlight feel tangible to the viewer.
The book critiques the cruelty and religious fanaticism of the past, using the "Chimera" as a metaphor for the illusions and dark myths that societies build to justify persecution. 3. The Poem: " La Chimera " by Dino Campana A cornerstone of Italian Orphic poetry from the collection Canti Orfici