Rereleased for its 30th anniversary, the macabre black-comic crime caper is from screenwriter John Hodge with Danny Boyle 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. It’s also a kind of 90s young person flatshare entertainment, but closer to the BBC’s This Life than Friends.
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, (Christopher Eccleston), and louche and grinning journalist Alex, played by Ewan McGregor. This grisly trio of entirely obnoxious individuals (who incidentally break the relatability rule that would nowadays be imposed on a movie like this) have a huge flat in Edinburgh and need a fourth person to share the bills. After auditioning a few people and variously pranking and humiliating them – behaviour which alone justifies everything they get, including the beating Alex receives in a hotel lavatory – they agree to a certain coolly mysterious applicant, played by Keith Allen, who claims to be writing a novel about the death of a priest. It is this enigmatic new flatmate who is to bring murder and chaos, double-cross and triple-cross, into these hapless people’s lives.
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. His voice is utterly distinctive: high, nasal and musical, perfect for irony and comedy and – as we were later to discover in Trainspotting – for big arias and voiceover set pieces. When Juliet shrinks from a certain act of barbarity, Alex snaps: “But Juliet you’re a doctor. You kill people every day.”
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 Nicolas Winding Refn’s gangland Pusher franchise.
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.
• Shallow Grave is in UK cinemas from 10 May.
