Obnoxious flatmates Ewan McGregor, Christopher Eccleston and Kerry Fox get way more than they bargained for with the arrival of enigmatic Keith Allen and a suitcase full of cash
making his feature-directing debut, giving us a hint of the turbocharged showmanship that always marked his style and which he was to crank up another notch a few years later with the zeitgeisty 90s hit Trainspotting. Shallow Grave is a bizarre Edinburgh noir, centring on cover-ups, disloyalty and incompetent corpse-management in the approximate spirit of Ealing, with touches of Hitchcock’s The Trouble With Harry and Orton’s Entertaining Mr Sloane.
We get an embarrassment of riches in the cast, with Peter Mullan, Ken Stott and Gary Lewis in small roles. But it’s the three stars who jump out of the screen at you: sexy hospital doctor Juliet, played by Kerry Fox, morose bespectacled accountant David, , and louche and grinning journalist Alex, played by Ewan McGregor. This grisly trio of entirely obnoxious individuals have a huge flat in Edinburgh and need a fourth person to share the bills.
The three leads each bring a fierce performance flavour. Fox’s Juliet is bored, sensual, idly fancying the correspondingly horny Alex, but clearly unable to decide if he is just too annoying to be worth it. Eccleston’s uptight and much-teased David has a streak of violence. But this was the film that first really alerted to us to the unique talent of McGregor, the slippery stripling with the rodenty smirk.
Added to this there is some off-camera dismemberment of cadavers and the now traditional scene in the store choosing saws and hammers to buy, but for a more gruesomely detailed account of how dead bodies are covertly taken to pieces in the real world, filmgoers would probably have to wait for Shallow Grave is persistently cynical and uningratiating, a tale of nasty, greedy, stupid people who don’t realise that the finders-keepers rule doesn’t apply to a suitcase full of cash whose criminal owners will not merely want it back but want to create the specific circumstances in which Juliet, David and Alex will be unable to testify against them in a court of law. A sour treat.
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