On the long list of films there can be no conceivable need to remake, Ikiru must be somewhere near the top. Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 drama about a Tokyo bureaucrat searching for meaning in the last months of his life is one of the Japanese master’s most revered and touching films. Stoic, unsentimental, attuned to questions of personal and collective duty, and navigating intricate hierarchies of office and class, it’s also Japanese in every detail. You can’t just reproduce it on the far side of the world in another language and assume it will still stack up.

Except with a few judicious adjustments, it turns out you can. The South African director Oliver Hermanus and Japanese-born British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro have collaborated on this supremely graceful and affecting adaptation, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this evening. Ishiguro’s screenplay elegantly transposes the story to 1950s London, and there is something lovely in the thought that it could be unfolding in parallel with Ikiru, and these two nations so recently at war are experiencing an unwitting moment of spiritual alignment.

In the lead role of Mr Williams, Bill Nighy gives one of the finest (not to say subtlest) performances of his career to date. A veteran civil servant at London County Council, Williams helps direct a stream of documents in brown envelopes around the building in an endless cycle of bureaucratic buck-passing. Lean and taciturn, he wears his pinstriped suit as if it’s armour, turning his gentlemanly exterior into an iron facade. 

But when Williams receives some awful news, this composed exterior begins to crack. A cancer diagnosis gives him just a few months to live, and working out what to do with the little time that remains becomes his animating purpose. There is an evening in a seaside town bar-hopping with a saucy playwright (Tom Burke), a (platonic) lunch at Fortnum & Mason with a sunny young female colleague (Sex Education’s Aimee Lou Wood) – and, later, a much-rerouted planning application for a children’s play area in a flooded East End bomb site is addressed with new vigour and resolve.

One of Nighy’s trustiest signature moves has always been the conspiratorial twinkle: that spark of mutual understanding he’s given to shooting at his cast-mates (and via them, us). But the brilliance of his performance here is all in the withholding, and the strange routes his existential crisis has to take in order to breach his unflappable surface.