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From Socialist Review, No. 183, February 1995, p. 26.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Shallow grave
Dir: Danny Boyle
Shallow Grave has its heart in the right place and, unlike practically every other bodily organ, it doesn’t become severed from its proper location during the film.
Boyle sets his sights on three Edinburgh yuppies of the high Thatcherite period. Their avarice, duplicity, cruelty and greed are pilloried from the very first scenes where they humiliate a series of applicants for the spare place in their fashionable flat.
The successful interviewee turns out to be a gangster who promptly dies of a drug overdose, leaving behind a suitcase full of money. The yuppies decide to keep the money and bury the body, pausing only to dismember it to prevent identification.
When the dead man’s two accomplices catch up with the yuppies, another bout of bloodletting ensues, resulting in a further two bodies which have to be disposed of in the same manner.
As the police close in, the worm of guilt and paranoia eats away at the three friends and a final session of mutual torture and violence gets under way.
All this should add up to a thoroughly macabre, anti-middle class morality tale, but the film doesn’t deliver on its early promise.
This is mainly because the focus of the film is so narrow. We spend all our time in the company of the three yuppies, rarely moving beyond the confines of their flat.
One consequence is to diminish the impact of the film’s hostility to the yuppies. Yuppies aren’t evil simply because they dress in expensive clothes and have designer kitchens or even because they are nasty to one another.
Yuppies have become a hated symbol of Tory Britain because they have climbed to where they are on the backs of the poor and because they deliberately and callously flaunt their wealth in the faces of the people on whose work they depend.
Shallow Grave extracts them from this circumstance and no amount of brutal individual behaviour can replace what is lost by failing to look at their brutality as a social group in relation to others.
The one scene which provides an exception proves the rule. At a social function the three bump into a working class bloke they previously humiliated as an applicant for their flat. He catches one of the yuppies and gives him a bloody nose. It is a rare moment of release in the length of the film.
Elsewhere tricky photography, ‘ironic’ dialogue and the inevitable fashionable nostalgic tune accompanying the menace (this time Nina Simone), plus other ‘postmodern’ devices, try to put a few bumps in the flatness of the film’s surface.
You know that this is going to lead to trouble when, early on, a voiceover mimics the classic film noir line ‘it could have been any city – they are all the same.’ But in this case the camera is skimming over the streets of Edinburgh’s New Town, one of the most visually distinctive European cities.
This kind of thing simply gives Shallow Grave the air of an art school graduation project when what it really needs is less flash and more attention to, for instance, a plot line which has the semblance of logic. (Why, for instance, do they have to dump the body in the first place? Why not report the death to the police and hide the money?)
That the critics have been so kind to Shallow Grave has more to do with it being a British film than any inherent qualities, as has the fact that the prodigious amounts of violence have largely gone unremarked upon, unlike the vastly superior, but American, Pulp Fiction.
All things considered, it was very brave of the film makers to include the word ‘shallow’ in the title.
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Last updated: 4 November 2019