Netflix's The Dig review: An archaeology drama with impeccable acting

Ralph Fiennes and Carey Mulligan star in Netflix’s film The Dig, which reimagines the excavation at Sutton Hoo, where a 27-metre burial ship was uncovered

The Dig

Simon Stone

Available on Netflix

BASIL BROWN, played in The Dig by Ralph Fiennes, was the principal archaeologist behind the 1939 excavation of Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, England. It is now considered one of the most important finds in Britain, the majesty of its 27-metre burial ship and 7th-century Anglo-Saxon treasures reframing historians’ view of the so-called Dark Ages.

However, it was very nearly missed – and Brown wasn’t always acknowledged for his efforts. He was a self-educated archaeologist and astronomer, who spent much of his income as a tenant farmer and insurance agent on that education. Being an independent scholar without an academic post was an irregularity that led to the omission of his name at the British Museum’s display of the Sutton Hoo treasures for decades.

The Dig, based on the novel of the same name by John Preston, rights that wrong. It is directed by Simon Stone with a distinctly British tone of restraint worthy of film producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory, who made the 1990s hits Howards End and The Remains of the Day.

The film approaches English passions cautiously, shining a light on Brown’s incredible contribution, as well as that of Edith Pretty (Carey Mulligan), the landowner who hired Brown to dig under the mounds on her estate because she had a “feeling” they would find something of note.

Fiennes and Mulligan are flawless as the excavators that the professionals underestimate, imbuing their characters with an intelligent zeal for the field that isn’t dampened by their places in society: he’s a lowly contractor for the Ipswich Museum, she’s a wealthy widowed landowner who went to finishing school. They share a quiet determination and mutual respect, initially arguing over which of the 18 mounds to tackle first, but finding common ground in the soil and its secrets. “That’s life what’s revealed,” Brown says in a thick Suffolk accent. “And that’s why we dig.”

Brown forms a friendship with Pretty’s young son Robert, a keen amateur archaeologist. It is all the more affecting as we learn that Pretty is dying so Robert will soon be an orphan (Pretty died in 1942).

“The Dig is obsessed with class boundaries. It fizzes with curbed passions amid honey-coloured fields”

This is a film of two halves, the first about archaeology, the second concerned with the personal lives of the people behind the dig. The first half is more successful, illustrating the patience necessary for excavation, especially in England where it is always raining, exposing fragile finds to the elements. It also reveals the dangers. In one of their earliest conversations, Pretty rescues Brown when the earth falls in on him and he claws desperately at the dirt. It is a good illustration of the risks an ordinary man took to exhume historical artefacts, only to be cast aside later.

Like Howards End and The Remains of the Day, The Dig is obsessed with class boundaries. It fizzes with curbed passions amid the honey-coloured English fields, the indomitable march of time making each ordinary moment both horribly transient, as the second world war calls up young men to die in the background, and simultaneously everlasting.

History is made of such things, and forgotten items – like Anglo-Saxon gold and Brown himself – can be retrieved.

In the second half, we learn more about other characters on the dig, including supercilious chauvinist Charles Phillips (Ken Stott) who arrives from the British Museum to oversee things. Then there are archaeologists Stuart Piggott (Ben Chaplin) and his wife Peggy Piggott (Lily James), whose strained marriage disintegrates before our eyes as Peggy forms an attachment with good-looking photographer Rory (Johnny Flynn).

The acting is impeccable, particularly from James, but the romance and domestic crises feel a little heavy-handed in a film that is otherwise so self-possessed. The Dig doesn’t need such frills. Like Sutton Hoo, the treasures aren’t showily arranged but lie quietly, in the silences between people, and in simple shared hopes that stretch across generations.