February 24, 1995 | You may hate yourself the morning after you see it — in fact, you may not like yourself too much even while you’re watching it — but you can have some down-and-dirty fun with Shallow Grave, a cheeky little thriller with a nasty sense of humor. Director Danny Boyle and screenwriter John Hodge have concocted an audacious piece of work, one that recalls Joel and Ethan Coen’s Blood Simple in its deft mixture of bloody violence, black comedy and toxic passions.
Set in Edinburgh, Scotland, the movie deals with three yuppie roommates who are much too clever for their own good, and much too eager to let the world know it.
Juliet (Kerry Fox of An Angel at My Table) is a medical student, David (Christopher Eccleston) is a stuffy accountant and Alex (Ewan McGregor) is an ambitious journalist. Just about the only things they have in common are a high regard for each other’s intelligence and an absolute certainty of their superiority. When they advertise for a fourth lodger to share expenses in their spacious apartment, it seems merely an excuse for them to taunt and humiliate anyone who submits to a meeting with them.
But then Juliet takes a shine to Hugo (Keith Allen), the most intriguing prospect of the bunch, and persuades her roommates to accept him into their household. Shortly after he moves into the spare bedroom, however, Hugo dies, apparently of a drug overdose.
Juliet, David and Alex discover his body lying in bed, right next to a money-stuffed suitcase. The roommates decide to dispose of the inconvenient corpse and keep the cash for themselves. This, they quickly discover, is a big mistake.
Much of what happens next in Shallow Grave is not for the faint-hearted. There is a scene devoted to the dismemberment of Hugo’s corpse, another scene that has the roommates dealing with two uninvited guests, and a bloody climax that shows what can happen when paranoia among plotters reaches the boiling point. Like Blood Simple, Shallow Grave is ingeniously booby-trapped with unsettling surprises. Also like Blood Simple, however, it will never be accused of understatement when it comes to violent behavior and its messy aftermath. Consider yourself warned.
Like many other debut filmmakers, Boyle, a veteran of British theater and television, and Hodge, a Glasgow-based doctor-turned-screenwriter, are a bit too self-consciously eager to make a dazzling first impression. They place great emphasis on suspense and narrative drive, but take a comparatively slapdash approach to character motivation. It’s never entirely clear, for example, why one roommate goes bonkers, and another turns out to be so treacherously manipulative. If the three lead players were any less excellent, these and other developments might be even more distracting in their arbitrariness.
As it stands, however, Shallow Grave is engrossing enough, and the actors (particularly Fox) are impressive enough, to paper over any number of troublesome flaws.
