It soon becomes clear, however, that we are actually supposed to care about his apparent impotence (or maybe homosexuality) and her romantic frustration (later wandering eye). At first it seems that drab Lily James, wearing her specs like the beautiful secretary who will pull a transformation in the last reel, and Ben Chaplin, again a generation older than his romantic partner, are just there as background decoration. It would be overstating the case to say the film falls apart in its last half hour, but focus too often strays to the dull romantic complications between a young couple drafted in to work on the later excavations. Sometimes it takes a foreigner to capture a nation’s soul. Mike Eley’s spinning camera captures an idealised, dust-flaked England – Hurricanes and Spitfires manoeuvring above – as it worries through a famously glorious summer. Much of the script is delivered as internal monologue.

Stone, an Australian directing his second feature, seems to have taken lessons from Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven.

Download the dig real story