(Credits: Far Out / Channel Four Films)
Danny Boyle’s indie hit Shallow Grave launched the first-time director’s career, along with those of its principal stars, Ewan McGregor and Christopher Eccleston. This classic tale of money’s corrupting power over humankind was made on a minimal budget and shot on location in Glasgow.
It’s now celebrated as a classic neo-noir thriller, receiving a special 30th-anniversary re-release this year – not a bad way to start out in filmmaking.
If anything, the movie’s low-budget aesthetics only add to the workaday credentials of its characters, which helps to make what happens to them so compelling. Alex, David and Juliet, played by McGregor, Eccleston and Kerry Fox, respectively, are three flatmates who happen upon a suitcase of money when their fourth cohabitant overdoses on drugs in his bedroom.
Their mutual lust for money leads them to cover up his death, burying his body in the shallow grave of the title. The three become increasingly paranoid and suspicious of one another as they wrestle with their actions, their desire for the money in the suitcase, and their fear of getting caught.
Things only get worse when two criminals break into their flat, looking for the man they’ve just buried, as well as the money he was carrying. David kills the two intruders and buries them in the same woods where he buried the overdose victim. These actions push him over the edge into full-blown paranoia.
When the three dead bodies are discovered, with police and journalists closing in on their crimes, the flatmates descend into a violent struggle to the death. Alex tries to call the police to save himself, David tries to kill Alex, and Juliet ends up killing David before pinning Alex to the floor of their flat with a knife.
Leaving him to the police, she escapes with the suitcase, heading for the first plane out of Scotland. But once she arrives at the airport, we see her crying hysterically in her car. She gets out, revealing a pile of newspaper clippings in the open suitcase next to her.
Who took the money?
As it turns out, Juliet doesn’t have it. David is dead, and Alex is stuck on the floor of the apartment. In the film’s final moments, a panning shot takes us underneath Alex’s body, to his blood dripping off the end of the knife beneath the floorboards of the flat the three shared. There, we see stacks of banknotes piled high between the boards.
From Alex’s smile, despite his near-fatal condition in the previous shot, we can assume that he removed the money from the suitcase and hid it under the floorboards. He’s also a journalist, which explains the newspaper cuttings Juliet finds in the suitcase after she opens it.
Will Alex be able to retrieve the money? Highly unlikely since he’ll probably be charged and convicted for what’s taken place in the flat. And in any case, the police would be able to find it stashed underneath him as soon as they removed the knife, pinning his body to the floorboards.
His smile ultimately betrays a feeling of schadenfreude towards someone he once called a friend who stuck a knife deep into his torso, framing him for serious crimes while she fled with what she thought was the money they agreed to share. The silver lining being, at least she didn’t get the money after all. Who needs enemies?
