Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
Everyone has their own Chimera, something they try to achieve but never manage to find. For Arthur, the Chimera looks like the woman he lost, Beniamina. In an adventurous journey between the living and the dead, between forests and cities, between celebrations and solitudes, the intertwined destinies of these characters unfold, all in search of the Chimera.
La Chimera is a quietly exceptional piece of magic realism from Alice Rohrwacher, blending tomb raiding, grief, and spiritual longing into something genuinely singular. Josh O'Connor's melancholy, dowsing Arthur is a remarkable creation — a man who can feel the dead beneath the earth but cannot reconnect with the living. The cinematography shifts aspect ratios and film stocks with dreamlike purposefulness, giving the film a handmade, enchanted texture. The plot's loose, picaresque structure is its great strength and occasional weakness — the momentum drifts in the middle third. The ending is poetically ambiguous but may feel incomplete to some viewers. Novelty is high because there is no other film quite like this — its tone, its relationship to the Italian landscape, its treatment of loss as a literal underground pull, all feel unmistakably Rohrwacher's own.