A year to live — how would you spend it?

Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 classic Ikiru (To Live) is a beloved anomaly within the seminal Japanese director's oeuvre. Not a gritty urban post-war Japanese noir, sweeping battle-filled tale or Samurai-era set Shakespeare adaptation, Ikiru is a moving and memorable morality tale about the struggles of a Tokyo bureaucrat to find meaning in his small, ordinary life after he’s diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Kurosawa’s film was always special for Nobel prize-winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, thanks to his memories of his mother’s re-enactments of Japanese film classics for her children who were born in Japan but raised in the stiff, class-dominated society of post-war Britain. In a recent interview, Ishiguro, whose novels The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go have provided the basis for memorable films, recalled that while riding in a taxi with the actor Bill Nighy, he was hit by an eureka moment. He had the idea of the much loved comic performer playing the role of the bureaucrat in a 1950s British-set remake. That led to the creation of Living, an elegantly executed reinterpretation of Ikiru, directed by South African Oliver Hermanus, which earned  Ishiguro and Nighy Oscar nominations.

Nighy stars as unflappable, reserved grey-man Mr Williams, whose routine-driven, dreary life of service as an official in the department of public works is shattered by a cancer diagnosis that leaves him with only a year to live. Devastated and deflated by the realisation of how little he has done with his life, Williams goes through a series of emotional reactions to his looming end that viewers of the original will recognise. His memories of his wife and his difficult relationship with his son flash before his eyes in hazy black and white before he decides to withdraw a large sum of money, skive off work for the first time and head to the seaside. Too afraid to commit suicide, he ends up confiding in a bon vivant (Tom Burke) who takes him carousing in bars and brothels before Williams’s rendition of a lovelorn Scottish folk song scares off customers and reminds us of the tragedy of his situation.

Back in London, still avoiding a return to the office, Williams strikes up a bittersweet friendship with young, vibrant former employee Margaret (Aimee Lou Wood) before she breaks his heart by telling him that the crush he harbours is not reciprocated. Finally, determined to do one meaningful thing with the time he has left, Williams returns to the office and sets about ensuring that a long frustrated attempt by some women to have a cesspit turned into a children’s playground becomes a reality.

Like the Kurosawa original, Ishiguro and Hermanus’s version splits the story into two — before the playground and Williams’s death, and after it — but thanks to some judicious alterations including the removal of the voiceover device and smart whittling of the scenes, Living stands on its own as a leaner, more efficient message about how best to live life.

Gloriously shot in a lush 1950s Technicolor style by South African cinematographer Jamie Ramsay that recalls classic British films of the period, meticulously designed to evoke a not-that-long-ago but almost completely disappeared London, and intelligently scored without melodrama by Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch, it’s a small film with a big message.

Thanks to the thoughtful decisions of its screenwriter, the delicate balancing act between homage and reimagination by its director and a career-best performance of devastatingly subtlety by Nighy, that plays against his popular image so tied to the bumbling comic charm of his romantic comedy outings, Living  succeeds on its own terms, while still offering movie buffs plenty of knowing winks to the original material. It also fixes one of the problems that Kurosawa had with Ikiru, which, as he told the film critic Donald Richie, was a dissatisfaction with the lead performance of his longtime collaborator, Takashi Shimura. The actor played the role of the maudlin bureaucrat Kenji Watanabe with what Kurosawa bemoaned was “all stops out. I would have preferred something more relaxed.” Nighy’s performance is more restrained but also more heartbreaking.

It’s a shame that despite starring a recognised and beloved British veteran, being written by a literary master, presenting a pivotal moment in the ever upward journey to international heights of a South African-born director and being nominated for two Oscars, Living has been snubbed by local distributors for a big screen release where its slight but confident and thoughtful reimaginations are best appreciated.

• Living is now available to buy from Apple TV +