Shallow Grave: Tale as Old as Time

It’s a tale as old as time. People—sometimes crooks, sometimes friends, sometimes virtuous—come into possession of money. Perhaps they’ve killed someone. Maybe they chance upon a sack, bulging with cash. In all cases, the treasure tears them apart. Often they kill each other in creative ways. The moral is clear: money severs all ties. It breeds suspicion.

In Chaucer’s Pardoner’s version, the tale takes the form of a sermon. His topic: radix malorum est cupiditas. Cupidity is the root of all evil—a Scriptural verse bent ever so slightly. Chaucer, never one for the straightforward, tinges the Pardoner’s story with irony. This preacher stands before his listeners as the ultimate hypocrite. Is his tale of three thieves to be believed? Can honeyed words, spoken by an evil man, sweeten, enrich hearts?

Danny Boyle’s debut feature Shallow Grave (1994) takes matters in a different direction. He presents three roommates, Alex (Ewan McGregor), David (Christopher Eccleston), and Juliet (Kerry Fox), living gleefully in Glasgow. A journalist, a lawyer, and a doctor respectively, they find no greater delight in life than humiliating a prospective fourth in their spacious Glasgow flat, painted in rich primary colors. Juliet has the boys inform suitors she’s never home, even when, of course, she is. Alex, rascal in all things, enjoins his roommates to greater and greater delinquency. David, the quietest of the bunch, stands aloof. You wonder why he’s living with them at all.

But then again, he’s the narrator. We keep coming back to his face, the camera spinning as his mute lips and dead stare tell us something terrible has happened. That something is a suitcase full of money, discovered one night when the roommates decide to play a prank on Hugo (Keith Allen), a novelist and the only person “interesting” enough to occupy their fourth bedroom. Needle not quite in arm, it seems to be heroin that’s done in him.

The money tears them apart. But you already know that. What gives Boyle’s version vitality thirty years later is his interest in reversals. The most hardened among the group are not the ones you think. The film’s narration itself turns out to be an elaborate game, setting up a final shot that drives home the moral as well as any could. He never lets us sit pretty in well-worn truths. Instead, Boyle invites us to consider the ingenious and dastardly ways that greed works on the human mind. And, if someone were to get away with it, that’d just be keeping with the fun.

28 Years Later (2025) is in theaters right now. While I haven’t seen it, I plan to. Shallow Grave testifies that Boyle has had the juice since the beginning—and a twisted sense of humor to boot.