Bill Nighy’s graceful performance in Living saves the film

He may be best known as Billy Mack in Love Actually but his new movie showcases the absolute emotional depths he can evoke.

Bill Nighy was nominated for an Oscar for his performance in Living. Picture: Transmission

Bill Nighy has had a long and varied career but for many, for all those who make it their yearly ritual to rewatch Love Actually, he’ll always be Billy Mack.

Even a cursory glance of Nighy’s filmography reveals a thespian with a flexible and playful talent.

He can ham it up as Davy Crockett, and as the blustery but warm-hearted Billy Mack or he can be grounded with a sad whimsy as a dad searching for his son in Sometimes Always Never.

But nothing will quite prepare you for his Oscar-nominated performance in Living, a graceful, life-affirming and stylish drama from director Oliver Hermanus, with a screenplay by renowned novelist (and Nobel Prize in Literature winner) Kazuo Ishiguro.

The movie is a slow-burn that never accelerates but Nighy’s performance makes it a compelling experience.

Adapted from Japanese master Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film Ikiru, itself inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Living is about death.

Living is in cinemas now. Picture: Transmission

Rodney Williams (Nighy) is a bureaucrat in charge of a council department. He’s apathetic and going through the motion, pushing papers into piles without any intention of taking something on.

His desk is the opposite of a clearing house, everything file goes there to die.

When Rodney receives a terminal cancer diagnosis, he’s shaken out of his zombified stupor. But it’s not a wake-up call in the way that it’s been portrayed in countless other stories. He doesn’t just go bungee jumping or call up on ex-girlfriend.

Like the movie itself, it’s a slower path to realisation, and Rodney goes through different emotional stages of grieving the life he’s hasn’t yet lost, but also the life he could’ve lived. Just like the piles of paper on his desk, he’s been going nowhere.

After absconding from work and taking himself somewhere out of character, he forms a friendship with a former colleague, a young woman named Miss Harris (Aimee Lou Wood).

Aimee Lou Wood is best known for her role in Sex Education. Picture: Transmission

To Rodney, Miss Harris has a natural verve and engagement with her present, something he has denied to himself. In these twilight weeks, he wants to understand how to capture some of that same spirit, or even to understand how he can experience life without a grey shroud.

The beauty of Nighy’s performance is that it is so subtle and yet so effective. The modulations between detachment and sadness aren’t always obvious but in Nighy’s hands, he takes you on that journey.

He’s doing incredibly difficult work by making it seem effortless. Nighy clearly has deep compassion for Rodney, and for that character’s journey to finally connecting with everything and everyone around him.

It’s what makes Living a more interesting proposition than it could’ve been.

The film itself boasts rich production design for its 1950s setting and Wood is amiable complement to Nighy’s energy. But Nighy’s performance – and Ishiguro’s script – elevates an otherwise humdrum movie.

Rating: 3/5

Living is in cinemas now