A junior staffer at the Department of Works calls her boss, Mr Williams, “Mr Zombie” behind his back. And why not? The strict, punctilious and unknowable Williams (played by Bill Nighy) comes across as one of the living dead.

No one in his small team of city planning bureaucrats knows at this point what a devastatingly apt nickname that is.

Bill Nighy in Living. Photo supplied.

Screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro and director Oliver Hermanus’ remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film Ikiru (To Live) transplants the story of a dying civil servant from Tokyo to London. The period remains the same, however, beautifully established in archival colour footage.

This is the London of the post-war reconstruction and Williams is on the front line, though you wouldn’t know it, such is the institutional inertia of which he is part. As the buck is passed from department to department, from underling to underling, decisions are agonisingly slow in coming – a process typified by the plight of a committee of women trying to create a small playground on an East End bombsite.

Williams is nearing retirement, but is unlikely to see it: he has been diagnosed with...