Delayed Reaction: Shallow Grave

Premise: Three flat mates gruesomely hide the body of their fourth roommate after he ODs so they can keep his money. Then all three start to mentally deteriorate over concerns that they will get caught.

On paper, I should love Danny Boyle. Slumdog Millionaire is a crowd-pleaser. Sunshine has a fun idea and great cast. Trainspotting is a cool movie. Even Yesterday is pretty charming. I'm pretty indifferent about him though, if I'm being honest. Most of my Danny Boyle affection is tied to that opening stretch of 28 Days Later... and the fact that The Beach was some early HBO boobspotting in my middle school days. What tends to lose me with Danny Boyle is that he's a very visual filmmaker; often to excess. I always want to tell him to take a breath when I'm watching one of his movies. I find him exhausting.

Shallow Grave is his debut movie. Debuts are nice for excessive filmmakers, because they are generally working with a more limited budget. The schedules are tighter too, so they don't get to play around as much. (I'm looking at you Darren Aronofski and Pi.) That is certainly true for this movie. It's a simple enough movie - three flat mates find their new roommate dead with a bunch of money, gruesomely hide his body, keep the money, slowly go insane, and turn on each other. Boyle sneaks in some stylistic flourishes, but it's mostly just a thriller. Much of it is even confined to their flat.

It helps that the movie stars a young Ewan McGregor and Christopher Eccleston. It has a young Kerry Fox too, but I don't know her from much. That core trio is strong. I really like the opening montage of them interviewing potential roommates, because it confirms that they are assholes from the beginning.

The movie lost me a bit in the middle. I didn't really buy Eccleston's decent into madness. It felt like it skipped a step somewhere. That's also where I felt the budgetary restraints more. That is a problem I run into with a lot of debut films. I know what the filmmaker can do when he has real resources later, so I can feel the limitations in this movie more than if it was my introduction to him. I have a good idea what the 2004 Shallow Grave would look like, which affects how I watch this version.

For those keeping track, I've said that I probably liked Shallow Grave more because it was made before Danny Boyle had the resources to overstylize it, and I've complained that the movie suffers because Boyle doesn't have the resources he does in his later movies. In other words, there's no making me happy. Or, this underlines the fact that there's no way to fully sell me on a Danny Boyle movie. Oh well.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend