Three professional twenty-somethings - journalist Alex, accountant David and doctor Juliet - who live in Edinburgh's New Town aggressively interrogate potential flatmates, before deciding the very cool Hugo meets their demanding standards. However, shortly after moving in, he is found dead with a suitcase full of money. After some discussion on what to do - and realising he probably wouldn't have had time to tell anyone where he was moving to - they decide to mutilate the body to prevent identification, bury it in the woods and stash the money in the attic. While Alex and Juliet are fairly laid back about what they have done, David is uneasy, particularly when the flat below is broken into, which is followed by a visit from the police. David moves into the attic, where he is secreted when two thugs on the trail of the loot, Goth and Andy, arrive and attack Alex and Juliet. He lures the heavies into the attic where he dispatches them; their bodies are also buried in the woods. David becomes increasingly paranoid, drilling holes in the attic floor so he can spy on his flatmates' movements. Matters are made more uneasy when Juliet becomes David's lover, having already bought a ticket to Brazil. When the three bodies are discovered, Alex is sent by his newspaper to report on it. Alex confronts David about his increasingly weird behaviour, leading to a violent fight over the money between the three former friends. 1994’s Shallow Grave was the first feature from the teaming up of director Danny Boyle and producer Andrew Macdonald, a partnership which would lead to such films as Trainspotting, The Beach, 28 Days Later and Sunshine and which has proved to be one of the most successful, both creatively and profitably, in British cinema. Shallow Grave also posed some problems for distributors when first released, mostly because it is a melange of very disparate elements, ranging from black comedy to psychological drama, particularly in the last quarter, when none of the three protagonists, McGregor and especially Eccleston looking almost unbelievably young and fresh, trusts each other, and Eccleston’s David seems to plunge the furthest into paranoia, taking up residence in the eaves of the roof, and it soon becomes a question of which one of them is going too be the next to die. Taken from a script by John Hodge, Glasgow-based writer and practising doctor, who also has a cameo as a cop, Boyle keeps the film moving brilliantly, as the three, who are also essentially innocent of any crime, at least initially, decide to dispose of the body if their lodger, played by a remarkably restrained Keith Allen, who has gone and rather inconveniently died on them, leaving the suitcase full of money which is where all the trouble starts, being the root of all evil indeed, and thank you, pedants, we know that the actual saying is ‘the love of money etc’. The central performances are all excellent, specially when the three start to realise the consequences of their actions, and how their plan may have been uncovered, and it is the constant sift in tone which makers the film so interesting and watchable, but also confused some distributors, some territories selling it very much as a straight horror pic, which it certainly isn’t. The budget is obviously tight and the locations limited, but Shallow Grave shows how talent and enthusiasm can overcome all these obstacles, and is a remarkably assured and confident directorial debut.