What’s the most underrated movie you’ve ever watched?
I’d be tempted to say Local Hero.
Now, if you’ve never seen it, darling, don’t expect explosions, breathless car chases, or a villain who explains his entire evil plan before the final act.
It’s a quieter sort of film.
An American businessman arrives in a little Scottish village with a job to do. He’s there to buy the place for an oil company, and at first, everything seems quite straightforward.
There’s a deal to be made. A price to be agreed. A business objective to achieve.
Except, of course, people get in the way.
Not in the inconvenient sense of people preventing progress, but in the rather more interesting sense that they have their own lives, their own priorities, and their own understanding of what makes a place worth living in.
The village isn’t simply a collection of properties on a spreadsheet.
It’s a community.
And the longer our visitor stays, the more complicated his task becomes.
I love that idea.
We spend so much time measuring things by what they’re worth on paper. The house price. The salary. The size of the business. The number of people who know our names.
And sometimes we forget to ask a rather important question.
What makes a life worth living?
Is it the money we earn? The opportunities we collect? The places we can afford to visit?
Or is it the people we know, the places where we feel at home, and the little things we might not even realise we would miss until they’re gone?
Local Hero doesn’t need to shout its message at you. It lets the characters, the landscape, and the humour do the work.
And that’s what I rather like about it.
It trusts the audience to notice things.
It allows the story to breathe.
And it understands that sometimes a person can travel halfway around the world on business and discover that the thing they were looking for wasn’t quite what they expected.
Good heavens, darling, I know the feeling.
Perhaps that’s why I think the film deserves more attention than it sometimes gets. It’s not trying to be the biggest or loudest film in the room.
It simply tells its story, with warmth and a little mischief, and leaves you with something to think about afterwards.
And if you ask me, that’s no small achievement.
Because the films that stay with us aren’t always the ones that leave us breathless.
Sometimes they’re the ones that quietly change the questions we ask ourselves.
So, if you’ve never watched Local Hero, give it an evening.
And afterwards, perhaps ask yourself what your own little corner of the world is worth to you.
You might discover it’s worth rather more than you thought.
Stay Fabulous,
Luce 💋
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