The three grow paranoid, and David, the meek accountant, moves into the attic with the cash, drilling holes in the ceiling so he can spy on the activities below.
There is a touch here of the Coen brothers' " Blood Simple," but if you want to see how a great director gets laughs with the con trast between gruesome deeds and the desire to avoid dry-cleaning bills, look at Martin Scorsese's "Goodfellas." Back at the flat, the desperate situation becomes more unmanageable. ("But Juliet - you're a doctor! You kill people every day!") The director, Danny Boyle, wants the disposal scenes to be funny, as he backlights his fastidious characters desperately sawing away at the bones of the dead. Incinerating the severed parts in the hospital where Juliet works.Īlex ( Ewan McGregor) and David ( Christopher Eccleston) certainly don't want to perform the dismemberment. This involves doing unsavory and unthinkable things that are completely outside their experience: cutting off the corpse's head, hands and feet to prevent identification. Then they decide that since no one knows he has come to live with them, they should dispose of the body and keep the cash. This quite annoys his new roommates, until they discover that his suitcase is filled with cash. Hugo moves in and is found dead of an overdose the next morning, sprawled on his red bedspread (in a shot inspired by the famous painting "The Death of Chatterton"). interesting," says Juliet ( Kerry Fox), the doctor.
They delight in humiliating and mocking applicants, until finally they find a customer tough enough to impress them: Hugo ( Keith Allen), a cool wise guy. They are particularly repulsive types of supercilious yuppie twits: a doctor, an accountant and a journalist. The movie takes place in Glasgow, Scotland, where three roommates are interviewing for a fourth. "Shallow Grave" does not supply a perfect murder by Orwell's standards - the first victim kills himself with drugs before his nasty new roommates can form any designs on him. (The disappearance of Helen Vorhees Brach took on a special interest because of speculations along these lines.) Much of the enjoyment, for newspaper readers, came from the notion of respectable professional people desperately hauling bodies about by moonlight. The classic cases feature bathtubs full of acid, bones buried in the backyard, corpses bricked up in the wall or fed to the dogs. The great preoccupation in the golden age of murder was, of course, disposal of the body.