Watched: 14th May 2024
Rating: 3.5/5 stars
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As soon as those opening credits came on, and that deep trance beat kicked in, I knew that I was in for a rare kind of treat – and I was right, for the most part! Shallow Grave is a film that, without a shadow of a doubt, could only have been made in the 90s, at times having more the qualities (both thematic and artistic) of a late-century ITV prestige crime drama than a bone-fide movie. However, I can look past the wrinkles that it shows thanks in no small part to the captivating strength of its leading trio. I liked Kerry Fox (even if the accent, while I’m sure accurate for Edinburgh, was just so grating in its poshness), really liked Ewan McGregor, and absolutely adored Christopher Eccleston. Whenever I’d seen stills from the film before, I always through he would one day be my style icon, but I thought his performance most of all blew everything else out of the water. Yes, sometimes the accent had its moments too – or perhaps that’s just me and my cultural cringe vis-à-vis a deep Scottish brogue – but he did a stellar job of charting David’s vertiginous descent into guilt-ridden paranoia.
Likewise, I felt that Danny Boyle’s direction was quite good at keeping you on the edge of your seat. Is Shallow Grave a black comedy with sharp edges, or is it really a thriller masking its rushes behind the laughter, lulling you in and then suddenly leaping out at you when you least expect it? Really, the distinction doesn’t matter, but the tone of the film does shift quite markedly towards the end in a way that I didn’t see coming. Even if I found myself having to squint my eyes whenever blood came up, I still thought this was a pretty decent film, one where we can already see Boyle beginning to experiment with the elements that he uses to such latter aplomb in other works.
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Originally posted on Letterboxd on 24th May 2024: https://boxd.it/6tvu07
Take a Luke 