Critics reviews

The beauty of La Chimera lies in its grace notes, its unexpected invocations and subterranean motifs. Though nearly all involved suffer a tangible, realistic downturn in their fortunes... it is romance and myth that govern the day

It may be a little uneven sometimes, especially when shifting from comedy to more serious concerns. And yet, it has a loopy charm that makes up for those occasional tonal inconsistencies. This film is clever, ambitious, and funny throughout, but it also works as an intelligent meditation on our attitudes toward life, love, and death.

There’s nothing quite like La Chimera—which is typical of the Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher, who is fond of adding dashes of magic to tales that explore her country’s past.

As a film so attuned to the subtle and profound historical shifts in both culture as a general concept and within Italy specifically, La Chimera logically, perfectly incorporates visual techniques running the history of film and theater.

No director of her genius would ever really make a bad film––if such a thing even exists––but we can be wary of a change in sensibilities here. Lazzaro‘s transcendental moments felt earned because his world was coarser to the touch. With Le Pupille and La Chimera, Rohrwacher is moving towards a cinema of fewer rough edges, and a poorer one for it.

No description of what happens in La Chimera can adequately convey what happens in La Chimera, which feels like watching an occurrence of ancient magic, from the point of view of the spell.

[The film's] approach to the camerawork never quite tips over into whimsy, carefully matching the central performance, which is characterful without being mannered, tough enough to carry us into a final act that both does and doesn’t draw all its narrative threads together.

Like Rohrwacher’s previous titles, she allows her characters to breathe in their environment while we orient ourselves to realities which are often mysterious and quite specific. Eventually, all the colors in the room even out for a finale quite literally cryptic and morosely romantic.

O’Connor’s exquisite performance seems to channel Harry Dean Stanton’s haunted turn in “Paris, Texas”; less wraith-like in its physicality, but similarly intangible, like a man being played by his own shadow.

A wonderfully strange Italian drama that finds mystery in a grimy modern world of rural backwaters and urban wastelands.

Rohrwacher’s divine La Chimera is an observant and comic portrait of a moment within Italian history, and an earthy, shimmering fable about the gravesites we walk over every day... [The film] confirms Rohrwacher as a figure absolutely central to the continuing tradition – and thus the future – of cinema. La Chimera doesn’t belong in a museum, it’s a living one.

Rohrwacher makes movies you sink into rather than watch dispassionately, taking time to establish the milieu as her characters and stories reveal themselves in layers.