The Dig Review: Why the Treasure Hunt Drama Should Be on Your Watch List
Netflix welcomed The Dig on its catalog of films, and it quickly became a big hit among fans and critics.
The Simon Stone-directed film is based on the 2007 novel of the same name by John Preston. It tells the story of a group of excavators and what happened to them during the 1939 excavation of Sutton Hoo.
The treasure hunt drama features Carey Mulligan (Edith Pretty), Ralph Fiennes (Basil Brown), Lily James (Peggy Piggott), Johnny Flynn (Rory Lomax), Ben Chaplin (Stuart Piggott), Ken Stott (Charles Phillips), Archie Barnes (Robert Pretty) and Monica Dolan (May Brown).
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The True Story Behind Netflix s The Dig
How a medium helped to find buried Anglo-Saxon treasure, plus all the other stuff the film doesn t tell you Larry Horricks/Netflix
A thoughtful reconstruction of an archaeological dig somewhere in deepest Suffolk feels like quite unlikely material for one of the first big Netflix hits of 2021, but
The Dig has turned out to be exactly that.
Carey Mulligan, Ralph Fiennes, Lily James and Johnny Flynn feature in the film based on John Preston s 2007 novel, also called
The Dig, which follows the excavation of burial mounds at the Sutton Hoo estate in 1938 and 1939. What started as a small investigation into mounds on land which had been farmed for centuries turned up the most extraordinary archaeological find of the century in Britain, and added a new set of national symbols to the English imagination.
The 86ft Anglo-Saxon burial ship at Sutton Hoo, Suffolk, was unearthed in 1939.
More than 260 items were discovered, including weapons, armour, coins, jewellery, gold buckles, patterned plaques and silver cutlery.
New Netflix film The Dig, starring Lily James, Ralph Fiennes and Carey Mulligan, dramatises the find and delves into the lives of those involved in the excavation.
Archaeologists Basil Brown, Peggy and Stuart Piggott and Charles Philips, as well as landowner Edith Pretty and her 12-year-old son Robert are all portrayed in the film.
The new release has received positive reviews from most critics and is popular with viewers, but just how does it match up to reality?
For Ralph Fiennes Basil Brown was an amazing man. The Suffolk-born actor talks about the self taught archaeologist who found the Sutton Hoo ship burial
“He had such a thirst for knowledge. He had a love of astronomy and wrote a book for the amateur astronomer to make the subject understandable for the ordinary person – and yet, at the same time, for all his knowledge, he remained a very unassuming person.”
Ralph Fiennes said that one of the key aspects of ‘finding’ Basil Brown was getting the accent right and he teamed up with Suffolk vocal coach Charlie Haylock to find Basil’s voice.
The pair bonded straight away and after a few weeks practicing in mirrors, Charlie and Ralph went incognito on a tour of Suffolk pubs to see if Ralph could pass himself off as a Suffolk local.