Basil and Edith are both buttoned-up in different ways. (The site in question, Sutton Hoo, proved to be one of the most consequential, not to mention lucrative, archeological finds in English history.) Terse workingman Basil and the businesslike Edith come to an arrangement, and soon enough, he’s uncovering something far grander than anyone previously imagined - an entire ship buried underground, the tomb of an ancient Anglo-Saxon king and proof that the people who inhabited this land were more than mere Vikings. Museums and excavations around the country scramble to finish their work and batten down the hatches for the oncoming devastation. Fighters from a nearby airfield glide across the sky. It’s the 1930s and war, it seems, is right around the corner. She wants him to dig up a series of large, mysterious mounds on her property, which have been the subject of speculation for decades. The film opens with humble excavator and amateur archeologist Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes) being called to the stately Suffolk home of wealthy widow Edith Pretty (Carey Mulligan). It’s a movie in which the newly unearthed past has a dramatic effect both on the characters’ lives and how they are presented onscreen. Simon Stone’s The Dig, based on a novel by John Preston which itself was based on real events, is in no way a horror film, but it suggests pretty much the same thing, both narratively and stylistically. Horror films that involve people uncovering ancient burial grounds often suggest that the ghosts of the past are somehow coloring and clouding the present - that history never really goes away. Carey Mulligan and Ralph Fiennes in The Dig.
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