Netflix's 'The Dig' is a Moment in Time Beautifully Captured

Netflix's The Dig is a beautifully made film, a meditative exploration of time, mortality, and heritage, that tells the story of one of England’s greatest archaeological discoveries, the Sutton Hoo ship burial and its treasures.

It is set in 1939, when England was on pause, waiting for a declaration of a war that is about to change everything. With a wonderful cast and cinematography, it is directed with great sensitivity by Simon Stone from a screenplay by Moira Buffini (Harlots), based on John Preston’s 2007 novel.

With war imminent, rich, widowed Edith Pretty (Carey Mulligan) knows time is running out for new archaeological excavations and is anxious to discover what the burial mounds on her land conceal. She hires a local expert, Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes), who works for the Ipswich (local) museum. He’s taciturn and dignified, a self-educated working-class man, whose father taught him to interpret changes in the soil, the essence of archaeological work. And he's an excavator, not an archaeologist.