La chimera

Plot

In 1980, Arthur, an irritable and sullen British former archaeologist, returns to his Italian home after being released from jail. After lashing out at his fellow passengers and a traveling salesman, he goes to visit his ex-girlfriend Beniamina's mother, Flora, at her crumbling estate, where he also meets her long-suffering housemaid and student, Italia. Beniamina has been missing for an undisclosed amount of time, but her mother is convinced she will one day return. Beniamina's sisters are sick of Arthur seemingly freeloading off their mother and try to find him a job, which he refuses.

Back at home, where he lives in a modest shack, Arthur reunites with his band of rakish tombaroli friends. At Epiphany celebrations, a farmer approaches them about locating a tomb on his land. Arthur, his gang, and a young photographer named Melodie (an associate of Spartaco, Arthur's antiquity dealer contact), search for the tomb, which Arthur locates using a dowsing rod and a 'chimera', a vision he experiences near gravesites. The gang deceives the farmer in order to excavate and fence the Etruscan grave goods for themselves, but are disappointed by their compensation from Spartaco.

As Arthur hangs around Flora's house, he grows close to Italia, who is hiding her two children in the house. After a festival, Arthur confesses his feelings to her on a beach. However, they are interrupted when Arthur experiences a chimera. Italia is upset by the revelation that Arthur and his friends are tomb robbers, as she believes that the grave goods he loots belong to the souls of the dead, not the living. She asks what Beniamina would think of him, but Arthur's band tells her that Beniamina is dead. Mocked and insulted, she storms away and threatens to call the police.

The "tomb" which Arthur detected turns out to be an untouched Etruscan underground shrine. Arthur is transfixed by the central statue of a goddess, and is heartbroken when his friends decapitate it in order to move it out of the chamber. The band is interrupted by police sirens and flee with the statue's head, unaware that the sirens were a trick by a rival group which loots the rest of the artifacts in the shrine.

After learning that they have the statue's head, Melodie brings the band to Spartaco, her aunt. She is on a boat, auctioning off the "priceless" headless statue to curators. Believing the statue to be their rightful loot, the tombaroli attempt to blackmail her with the statue's head. Arthur unwraps the head, but, remembering Italia's words, hurls it overboard into the lake, to the astonishment and fury of Spartaco and the other tombaroli.

On the train back, Arthur envisions the passengers and salesman from the first scene asking him where their grave goods have been taken. After parting ways with his band, he returns to his shack only to see it demolished by the police. He gets back in touch with Italia, who was evicted by Flora's daughters and has set up a communal squat with other single mothers in an abandoned train station. She invites him to live with them, but Arthur sneaks away after staying the night.

Arthur joins the rival band of tombaroli. When he locates an underground chamber, they implore him to enter it first. As it collapses onto him, Arthur has a final vision where he reunites with Beniamina.

Production

Filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher planned La chimera as the last part of a trilogy with Le meraviglie (The Wonders, 2014) and Lazzaro felice (Happy as Lazzaro, 2018) to investigate our relationship with the past. For the last film she chose an international cast for the first time.

Filming was in February 2022 and in August 2022, on locations in southern Tuscany (Montalcino, Asciano–Monte Antico railway, Monte Amiata Scalo, Torrenieri), northern Lazio (Tarquinia, Blera, San Lorenzo Nuovo, Civitavecchia) and Umbria (villa di Casa Pisana in Castel Giorgio), with additional filming in Switzerland.

Release

La chimera premiered at the 76th Cannes Film Festival on 26 May 2023, where it was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or and received a nine-minute standing ovation. It screened at the 61st New York Film Festival in October 2023. It was also invited at the 28th Busan International Film Festival in 'Icon' section and was screened on 7 October 2023.

It was released in Italy by 01 Distribution on 23 November 2023, and in France by Ad Vitam on 6 December 2023. Neon acquired North American distribution rights to the film at the Marché du Film at Cannes in May 2022; it was released in the United States by Neon on 29 March 2024. Earlier, in the United States, it was released for a one-week awards-qualifying run beginning 8 December 2023. Elastica released the film in Spain on 19 April 2024. Curzon released the film in the United Kingdom and Ireland on 10 May 2024.

Reception

Box office

The film opened in North America on 29 March 2024 and grossed $44,511 from 3 theatres during its opening weekend, finishing 32nd at the box office.

As of 11 September 2024, La chimera grossed $1 million in North America (USA, Canada and Puerto Rico), and $4,231,797 in other territories, for a worldwide total of $5.2 million.

Critical response

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 95% of 151 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 8.2/10. The website's consensus reads: "If La Chimera is a wild, improbable pursuit, this marvelous and magical tale by Alice Rohrwacher is the pie in the sky to behold." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 91 out of 100, based on 31 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".

In his review for Variety, following its premiere at Cannes, Guy Lodge called the film "marvelously supple and sinuous" and commended Rohrwacher's direction, the cinematography and the cast performances, particularly O'Connor's, of which he wrote: "Raffish and boyish at the same time—or switching between either mode as a cover for the other—O'Connor's deft, droll performance implies such possibilities without sentimentalizing them". Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave the film five out of five stars, reporting that the film "totally occupies its own narrative space," depicting "a poignant sense of Italy as a treasure trove of past glories, a necropolitan culture of ancient excellence," through direction that is "exhilarating and celebratory in its utterly distinctive style."

The film was considered one of the best Italian films of 2023 by Italian critics. Alessandro De Simone of Ciak wrote that it has "an avowedly Pasolinian structure" in which the director inserts "a calculated anarchy in narrative and in staging," finding it overall "very simple, the chaos is orderly, fascinating and magical," although "it could have been more so." Andrea Chimento of Il Sole 24 Ore described the project as Rohrwacher's "most ambitious and profound operation", which although it "spins too much in the middle part," emerges as "an intriguing and enigmatic film, endowed with a symbolic atmosphere that makes it a feature film worth thinking about and digesting."

In June 2025, IndieWire ranked the film at number 18 on its list of "The 100 Best Movies of the 2020s (So Far)." In July 2025, it was one of the films voted for the "Readers' Choice" edition of The New York Times' list of "The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century," finishing at number 187.