Shallow Grave

18/11/2025

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This could have been any city. They’re all the same” we hear in the opening voiceover to Shallow Grave, before the film then hurtles through the streets in a high-speed frame-rate, while Leftfield becomes more forcefully present on the soundtrack. Those watching may insist this isn’t any old city, after all, but the specific streets of Edinburgh’s New Town, built in the late 18th century and into the 19th. Work started in 1766 and was completed in 1817. It was seen as a neo-classical masterpiece and vital to Edinburgh’s status as a Unesco World Heritage Site. “The New Town was conceived on a scale never seen in the burgh before.” (Edinburgh: A History of the City). It coincided with the Scottish Enlightenment, made up of figures including David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Thomas Reid, and William Roberts, and Voltaire said of Edinburgh: “today it is from Scotland that we get rules of taste in all the arts, from epic poetry to gardening.” (Encyclopedia Britannica) If Edinburgh was seen as the Athens of the North, it was topos, intellect, and architectural. The volcano reminded visitors of the Acropolis, the thinkers of the Greeks, and, with the New Town, the architecture brought to mind the classicism of the Ancients. Hume was one of the first to move there. As Michael Fry says, “David Hume was one who led the pack: not quite a wealthy man, though of independent means, he flitted in 1769 from James’s Court  to a house in what became St David’s Street - facetiously so named after him.” (Edinburgh: A History of the City)
       While the film might provocatively propose that Edinburgh is no different from any other city, this might be all the more galling for Scots who have become used to outsider perspectives on the place, with 39 Steps, Greyfriars Bobby, and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie all directed by filmmakers from elsewhere. It would be a bit unfair to claim this is another example of it, given the writer and producer (John Hodge, Andrew Macdonald) are Scottish, even if its director is the Mancunian Danny Boyle, with the three of them teaming up again for another Edinburgh work a couple of years later: the much more famous and accomplished Trainspotting, based on Irvine Welsh’s brilliantly uncouth novel.
      Here, it is less the city that is unoriginal; more its story, with three characters discovering a suitcase full of money after their new flatmate is found dead in his room, lying, like Henry Wallis’s The Death of Chatterton.  Finding a bag of cash and wondering what to do about it is a common enough trope even in later Boyle movies, let alone film generally. (Renton decides to go off with the spoils from a drug deal at the end of Trainspotting, and the kids in Millions come across a holdall full of dosh on a train line.) Boyle’s purpose isn’t to tell an original story but to tell the story originally, finding a visual style to the material that announces a new directorical talent. (It was his first feature) That the dead body resembles a pre-Raphaelite painting is a good place to start, and the film offers other painterly references as well. When the three flatmates, David (Christopher Ecclestone), Alex (Ewan McGregor), and Juliet (Kerry Fox), are dining initially with the new flatmate, the film plays up candles out of Georges de la Tour and the most extravagant fruit bowl since Severin Roesen. Boyle and his production designer, Kave Quinn, emphasize the flat’s chromatic scheme, creating blocks of colour that can suggest the peppy or the menacing. The dead man’s room is a rich royal blue, while the hall is sky blue. The kitchen is canary yellow and cool green; the sitting room colours are similar to the kitchen, but with a slightly darker emphasis.
          The film’s style is helped along by the special spatial quality of New Town flats, even if Boyle and co. filmed in a slightly exaggerated version of them in a Glasgow Warehouse. Yet watching the film, it seems only the mildest of architectural hyperbole  — the flats are famously large. A two-bedroom Manhattan apartment could cost you three times the price of a New Town Georgian property, with 400 square metres over four floors in Edinburgh costing a mere £2million. It is not impossible that three professionals could share a larger-than-life one-floor apartment in North East Circus Place, where the film is mainly set and was partly filmed. When we see Alex cycling around the sitting room, it isn’t completely implausible as he passes the three enormous Georgian windows. “We spent all our money on the set, the flat,’’ Boyle said years later, ‘‘and we ran out of money by the end” (Indiewire)
       If the film is at all memorable thirty years after its release, it rests more on its mise en scene than on its narrative skill. The story isn't only predictable but patchy; the plot about where the money came from elaborated only enough to register the danger the three are in when the killers come looking for them.  Nor are we surprised when Alex, David, and Juliet all turn against each other - the film leaves us in no doubt they are awful people, evident in the early sequence when interviewing the fourth flatmate. It is an exercise in humiliation for the potentially new tenant, and the film doesn’t create much of a distance between the flatmates’ prejudice and the viewer’s tolerance of them, even if there is a later scene when the three bump into one of the prospective tenants and humiliate him all over again. When Alex goes into the toilet, in comes the bloke with a couple of mates behind him. Alex gets a pasting, and while we might think it deserved, it doesn’t make us any more sympathetic to the three characters.
   This isn’t to propose a film needs to offer characters we too readily identify with, but there is a difference between unsympathetic and obnoxious, and if you do insist on the latter, then better make them complex, or the situations so. Popeye Doyle in The French Connection isn’t nice, but he is purposeful; just as Michael Corleone in The Godfather isn’t always a great guy, but he is a man with a lot of accumulating responsibilities — we are identifying at least with their predicaments if not with their characters. In Shallow Grave, the situation isn't only thin, there are almost no added aspects to their characters - their family circumstances, their difficulties at work. The closest we get is probably David left with a chunky accounting problem that makes the carving up of a human appear the lesser of two evils.
       Yet in some ways, the worse the film is, the better Edinburgh looks, as we might conclude that if the film really had been filmed anywhere, that the city it is set in doesn’t matter, it would be a weaker work, yet another thriller about money in a bag and three greedy characters fighting over the spoils. Instead, it becomes a version of Kammerspiele, of chamber drama. It was a term originally to describe certain German Expressionist films of the 20s, but would include work by Hitchcock (Rope), Polanski (Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby), Fassbinder (The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant), and Linklater (Tape). It makes the most of limitations that in Boyle’s case were partly due to budget, but finds freedom in an expressionist design that can capture the emotions of the characters as they go through various states. It is a pity Boyle and Hodge didn’t put them through a few more and create a work of great claustrophobia that would, at the same time, have helped us to comprehend characters who don’t have the empathic wherewithal to make the most of their good fortune within their dubious behaviour. The film may suggest a happy ending of sorts for Alex, but the film is the sort of unkind work that could have killed off its three leads without the audience much caring. It is more the apartment a viewer would be inclined to die for.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Shallow Grave

This could have been any city. They’re all the same” we hear in the opening voiceover to Shallow Grave, before the film then hurtles through the streets in a high-speed frame-rate, while Leftfield becomes more forcefully present on the soundtrack. Those watching may insist this isn’t any old city, after all, but the specific streets of Edinburgh’s New Town, built in the late 18th century and into the 19th. Work started in 1766 and was completed in 1817. It was seen as a neo-classical masterpiece and vital to Edinburgh’s status as a Unesco World Heritage Site. “The New Town was conceived on a scale never seen in the burgh before.” (Edinburgh: A History of the City). It coincided with the Scottish Enlightenment, made up of figures including David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Thomas Reid, and William Roberts, and Voltaire said of Edinburgh: “today it is from Scotland that we get rules of taste in all the arts, from epic poetry to gardening.” (Encyclopedia Britannica) If Edinburgh was seen as the Athens of the North, it was topos, intellect, and architectural. The volcano reminded visitors of the Acropolis, the thinkers of the Greeks, and, with the New Town, the architecture brought to mind the classicism of the Ancients. Hume was one of the first to move there. As Michael Fry says, “David Hume was one who led the pack: not quite a wealthy man, though of independent means, he flitted in 1769 from James’s Court  to a house in what became St David’s Street - facetiously so named after him.” (Edinburgh: A History of the City)
       While the film might provocatively propose that Edinburgh is no different from any other city, this might be all the more galling for Scots who have become used to outsider perspectives on the place, with 39 Steps, Greyfriars Bobby, and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie all directed by filmmakers from elsewhere. It would be a bit unfair to claim this is another example of it, given the writer and producer (John Hodge, Andrew Macdonald) are Scottish, even if its director is the Mancunian Danny Boyle, with the three of them teaming up again for another Edinburgh work a couple of years later: the much more famous and accomplished Trainspotting, based on Irvine Welsh’s brilliantly uncouth novel.
      Here, it is less the city that is unoriginal; more its story, with three characters discovering a suitcase full of money after their new flatmate is found dead in his room, lying, like Henry Wallis’s The Death of Chatterton.  Finding a bag of cash and wondering what to do about it is a common enough trope even in later Boyle movies, let alone film generally. (Renton decides to go off with the spoils from a drug deal at the end of Trainspotting, and the kids in Millions come across a holdall full of dosh on a train line.) Boyle’s purpose isn’t to tell an original story but to tell the story originally, finding a visual style to the material that announces a new directorical talent. (It was his first feature) That the dead body resembles a pre-Raphaelite painting is a good place to start, and the film offers other painterly references as well. When the three flatmates, David (Christopher Ecclestone), Alex (Ewan McGregor), and Juliet (Kerry Fox), are dining initially with the new flatmate, the film plays up candles out of Georges de la Tour and the most extravagant fruit bowl since Severin Roesen. Boyle and his production designer, Kave Quinn, emphasize the flat’s chromatic scheme, creating blocks of colour that can suggest the peppy or the menacing. The dead man’s room is a rich royal blue, while the hall is sky blue. The kitchen is canary yellow and cool green; the sitting room colours are similar to the kitchen, but with a slightly darker emphasis.
          The film’s style is helped along by the special spatial quality of New Town flats, even if Boyle and co. filmed in a slightly exaggerated version of them in a Glasgow Warehouse. Yet watching the film, it seems only the mildest of architectural hyperbole  — the flats are famously large. A two-bedroom Manhattan apartment could cost you three times the price of a New Town Georgian property, with 400 square metres over four floors in Edinburgh costing a mere £2million. It is not impossible that three professionals could share a larger-than-life one-floor apartment in North East Circus Place, where the film is mainly set and was partly filmed. When we see Alex cycling around the sitting room, it isn’t completely implausible as he passes the three enormous Georgian windows. “We spent all our money on the set, the flat,’’ Boyle said years later, ‘‘and we ran out of money by the end” (Indiewire)
       If the film is at all memorable thirty years after its release, it rests more on its mise en scene than on its narrative skill. The story isn't only predictable but patchy; the plot about where the money came from elaborated only enough to register the danger the three are in when the killers come looking for them.  Nor are we surprised when Alex, David, and Juliet all turn against each other - the film leaves us in no doubt they are awful people, evident in the early sequence when interviewing the fourth flatmate. It is an exercise in humiliation for the potentially new tenant, and the film doesn’t create much of a distance between the flatmates’ prejudice and the viewer’s tolerance of them, even if there is a later scene when the three bump into one of the prospective tenants and humiliate him all over again. When Alex goes into the toilet, in comes the bloke with a couple of mates behind him. Alex gets a pasting, and while we might think it deserved, it doesn’t make us any more sympathetic to the three characters.
   This isn’t to propose a film needs to offer characters we too readily identify with, but there is a difference between unsympathetic and obnoxious, and if you do insist on the latter, then better make them complex, or the situations so. Popeye Doyle in The French Connection isn’t nice, but he is purposeful; just as Michael Corleone in The Godfather isn’t always a great guy, but he is a man with a lot of accumulating responsibilities — we are identifying at least with their predicaments if not with their characters. In Shallow Grave, the situation isn't only thin, there are almost no added aspects to their characters - their family circumstances, their difficulties at work. The closest we get is probably David left with a chunky accounting problem that makes the carving up of a human appear the lesser of two evils.
       Yet in some ways, the worse the film is, the better Edinburgh looks, as we might conclude that if the film really had been filmed anywhere, that the city it is set in doesn’t matter, it would be a weaker work, yet another thriller about money in a bag and three greedy characters fighting over the spoils. Instead, it becomes a version of Kammerspiele, of chamber drama. It was a term originally to describe certain German Expressionist films of the 20s, but would include work by Hitchcock (Rope), Polanski (Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby), Fassbinder (The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant), and Linklater (Tape). It makes the most of limitations that in Boyle’s case were partly due to budget, but finds freedom in an expressionist design that can capture the emotions of the characters as they go through various states. It is a pity Boyle and Hodge didn’t put them through a few more and create a work of great claustrophobia that would, at the same time, have helped us to comprehend characters who don’t have the empathic wherewithal to make the most of their good fortune within their dubious behaviour. The film may suggest a happy ending of sorts for Alex, but the film is the sort of unkind work that could have killed off its three leads without the audience much caring. It is more the apartment a viewer would be inclined to die for.

© Tony McKibbin