“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, David, Juliet, and Alex go from light-hearted, smug twenty-somethings to being questioned by the police for something much worse and much more serious. 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.

When Hugo first arrives at the flat, he only speaks a few words to Juliet directly, but then the conversation changes to a voice-over narration 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,” a.k.a waterboarding, a man they believe knows where Hugo is.

From the first scene, we are engrossed in the vibrant color of the apartment, where every room has its own dusty color palette and high ceilings, lots of natural light, and minimal clutter. In almost every scene, the contrast seems almost unnatural. 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 sit 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 sits 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 reversed; the detectives dominate the frame on one sofa, while Alex, Juliet, and David are very small and centered in the frame.

Our textbook tells us that “in every movie, the camera is the primary narrator. Its narration consists of the many visual elements it captures and arranges in every composition in every shot.” The way the camera moves in Shallow Grave is very efficient and effective. At the start of the film, we are shown contrasting locations of the fast-moving streets of Glasgow and a slow crawl into the city’s surrounding woods. The movie and narrative start in the city and the forest is where we haven’t been yet, but we know we will be there soon enough for one reason or another.

There is very little first-person voice-over narration throughout the film, but what is there is very effective; everything in a film is there for a reason. At both the beginning and the end of the film, David is on a table looking directly at the camera somewhat breaking the fourth wall and says “this could have been any city. They’re all the same.” Restricted narration makes watching the ending scenes of Shallow Grave excruciating at first, but worthwhile in the end. We see Juliet in her car in hysterics after she ultimately killed both David and Alex at one angle and then swing 180 degrees to the other side of the car to see what she is seeing: Hugo’s briefcase filled with not money, but newspaper clippings. While watching the film again for the purpose of this assignment, I found myself questioning the character of all three of the main characters. They seem to all be the story’s anti-heroes. They are all annoying, cocky bastards who don’t care about what they do nor how their actions will affect anyone around them, but by the end of the movie, you are rooting for one of them to get out of there alive with the briefcase full of money. Yes, not a lot of people have a dead, rich roommate and then decide to dismember them in the woods, but it is easy to empathize with David especially when he cannot give into Alex’s wishes to help him dismember the body. Yet, this story needs rounded characters. David, who starts out well-mannered, seems to be the mom of the group, and deals with both Juliet and Alex’s shit, goes through a major shift during the second act when they all start to be suspicious of each other: he becomes a hermit in the attic and drills holes in the ceiling to spy on his so called “friends.” Juliet, who throughout the whole film is a very strong and independent woman and does no harm herself, literally takes matters into her own hands at the end of the film and kills her friends. Alex, who is centered on the money since the moment he found it under Hugo’s bed, seems to be legitimately distraught in his final moments about what is happening to his friends.

The color red, commonly associated with blood, love, and passion for example, is also associated with a number of other cinematic aspects in the film. 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 when the roommates burst into his room, the bright red door of the apartment, Alex’s bike that he rides around the apartment during the interviews, 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 a bit of romance 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. Guthmann, Edward. Chronicle Staff. “‘Grave’ Is So Good, It’s Scary.” SFGate. San Francisco Chronicle, 24 Feb. 1995. Web. 06 Oct. 2016.
3. Hodge, John. “Shallow Grave.” (1995). Fandango, 20 Nov. 2005. Web. 06 Oct. 2016.
4. Kemp, Philip. “Shallow Grave: A Film Called Cruel.” The Criterion Collection, 13 June 2012. Web. 06 Oct. 2016.
5. Ross, Emma Madeline. “Shallow Grave’s Coat of Paint.” Brancé Design. Brancé Design, 5 Nov. 2014. Web. 7 Oct. 2016.
6. “Shallow Grave.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 06 Oct. 2016.
7. Shallow Grave. Dir. Danny Boyle. Perf. Ewan McGregor and Kerry Fox. Channel Four Films, 1995.