“Oh, yes, I believe in friends, I believe we need them, but if, one day, you find you can’t trust them any more, well, what then, what then?”

Shallow Grave is a 1994 British dark comedy that signified the directorial debut of Danny Boyle, with an original screenplay by John Hodge. David Stephens (played by Christopher Eccleston), an accountant, Juliet Miller (played by Kerry Fox), a physician, and Alex Law (played by Ewan McGregor), a journalist, are roommates in a flat in Edinburgh who are looking for a fourth roommate. They interview a series of candidates and in the process humiliate them; at one point Alex asks “what on Earth would make you think we’d want to share a flat with you?” In the short span of the film (only 92 minutes), David, Juliet, and Alex go from light-hearted, smug twenty-somethings to murders (spoiler).

This transition happens when Hugo (played by Keith Allen) comes in for an interview and passes the roommate “test.” One day, after Hugo has not been seen for a few days, the gang decides to go into his room, where they find him naked and sprawled out on his bed, seemingly dead from some sort of drug overdose. Alex, the type to do so, immediately starts looking through Hugo’s personal effects and finds a suitcase full of cash. What to do next? Dispose of the body (in the most gruesome way possible) and keep the money.

From the first scene, we are engrossed in the vibrant color of the apartment, where every room has its own dusty color pallet and high ceilings, lots of natural light, and minimal clutter. Even though the apartment itself is very open, with the high ceilings and amount of natural light sources, the focus on one location for the majority of the movie enhances the sense of a closed-in, almost claustrophobic space, which feels increasingly smaller throughout the movie. During the interview scenes, Alex, Juliet, and David are sat on the sofa in the center of the frame and seem to be staring at you as you watch them interview potential roommates. Each candidate is sat on the opposite sofa. The sofa takes up the whole frame, while the person is also centered but very small compared to everything else in the scene; you can feel how intimidating the three of them are. Later in the movie where each of them are being questioned by the police about Hugo’s disappearance, the rolls are switched; the detectives dominate the frame on one sofa, while Alex, Juliet, and David are very small and centered in the frame. Before the filming process began, Boyle had the three main actors live together for several weeks in a similar apartment to make the intimacy between them feel casual.

When Hugo first arrives at the flat, he only speaks a few words to Juliet directly, but then the conversation changes to a voiceover while Juliet and Hugo stare at each other which distances them from each other. Hugo again feels very distant at dinner, only listening in on Alex, David, and Juliet’s conversation with nothing to add. The parallel editing between Hugo and Alex talking at dinner after Alex asking “can you afford this place,” and what seem to be Hugo’s goons killing someone at an ATM and then stealing his money creates suspense and confusion in an otherwise normal scene. There is also parallel editing in the scene where Alex, Juliet, and David are loading up their van to go bury Hugo and where Hugo’s goons are “questioning” (waterboarding) a man they believe knows where Hugo is.

A motif that runs through Shallow Grave seems to be the color red; after starting this class and watching the movie again to do this assignment, I kept seeing it again and again. Of course red symbolizes blood (from all the murdering), but there is also the blanket Hugo is sprawled across in his room when the roommates burst into his room, the light (check out the image above) against the fog when Alex is burying Hugo’s goons, the dress that Juliet carefully lays out on her bed, most likely knowing Alex can see her undress from the attic, and the single blood-stained banknote hidden in the floorboards under Alex as he bleeds out.

This movie is really great. Highly recommend. It has enough thriller, suspense, murder-mystery, and romance (somewhat) for anyone. This movie launched Danny Boyle’s directing career and this was also Ewan McGregor’s first big screen role.

References

1. Barsam, Richard Meran, and Dave Monahan. Looking at Movies: An Introduction to Film. 5th ed. N.p.: W. W. Norton, 2015. Print.
2. Critic, EDWARD GUTHMANN Chronicle Staff. “`Grave’ Is So Good, It’s Scary.”SFGate. San Francisco Chronicle, 24 Feb. 1995. Web. 06 Oct. 2016.
3. Kemp, Philip. “Shallow Grave: A Film Called Cruel.” The Criterion Collection, 13 June 2012. Web. 06 Oct. 2016.
4. “Shallow Grave.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 06 Oct. 2016.
5. Hodge, John. “Shallow Grave.”  (1995). Fandango, 20 Nov. 2005. Web. 06 Oct. 2016.