Three roommates in a large flat in Glasgow, Scotland, decide to find another roommate. They choose Hugo, who soon winds up dead of an overdose in his room leaving behind a suitcase full of money. When they decide to keep the money, the downward spiral of their friendships and lives ensue.

Possessed of startlingly fresh performances and a visual style of genuine panache, Shallow Grave was deservedly a BAFTA Best Film winner in 1994. This was clearly a film that deserved attention. Sure enough, the principal talents involved (Director Danny Boyle, Producer Andrew Macdonald, Writer John Hodge and actors Christopher Eccleston and Ewan McGregor) have gone on to huge successes both together (Trainspotting) and apart. The thriller's plot is simple enough: three flatmates take on a fourth (Keith Allen) who unexpectedly dies, leaving a mountain of cash behind. Who are your friends? Who can you trust? How far would you go for money? These are the questions facing Juliet (Kerry Fox), David (Eccleston) and Alex (McGregor) as the scenario spirals out of control around them. Somehow no matter what they do, the decisions seem to lead to one gruesome event after another. The film's often breakneck pace--backed by tunes from Leftfield --quickly became a much-copied style. Most agree that the copies pale beside the original, and this ice-cold morality poser remains the best view of post-80s greed on screen.

`Shallow Grave" is a movie that might have warmed the heart of George Orwell, who in his famous essay "The Decline of the English Murder" complained that too many modern murders were simply unmotivated acts of squalid violence. "Let me try to define," he wrote, "what it is that the readers of the Sunday papers mean when they fretfully say, `you never seem to get a good murder nowadays.' " In the golden age of murder, which he places between 1850 and 1925, "good murders" had several distinguishing characteristics. To begin with, the murderers were generally "little men of the professional class" - doctors, lawyers, the chairman of the local Conservatives. They lived in intense respectability in semidetached houses, so that strange noises could be heard by the neighbors. They killed not out of passion, but for convenience - to cover up an adultery or a theft, say. Their motive was often financial gain. Their method was usually poison. The great preoccupation in the golden age of murder was, of course, disposal of the body. The classic cases feature bathtubs full of acid, bones buried in the backyard, corpses bricked up in the wall or fed to the dogs. (The disappearance of Helen Vorhees Brach took on a special interest because of speculations along these lines.) Much of the enjoyment, for newspaper readers, came from the notion of respectable professional people desperately hauling bodies about by moonlight. "Shallow Grave" does not supply a perfect murder by Orwell's standards - the first victim kills himself with drugs before his nasty new roommates can form any designs on him. But it qualifies in many other ways. The movie takes place in Glasgow, Scotland, where three roommates are interviewing for a fourth. They are particularly repulsive types of supercilious yuppie twits: a doctor, an accountant and a journalist. They delight in humiliating and mocking applicants, until finally they find a customer tough enough to impress them: Hugo (Keith Allen), a cool wise guy. "He's . . . interesting," says Juliet (Kerry Fox), the doctor. Hugo moves in and is found dead of an overdose the next morning, sprawled on his red bedspread (in a shot inspired by the famous painting "The Death of Chatterton"). This quite annoys his new roommates, until they discover that his suitcase is filled with cash. Then they decide that since no one knows he has come to live with them, they should dispose of the body and keep the cash. This involves doing unsavory and unthinkable things that are completely outside their experience: cutting off the corpse's head, hands and feet to prevent identification. Burying the remains. Incinerating the severed parts in the hospital where Juliet works. Alex (Ewan McGregor) and David (Christopher Eccleston) certainly don't want to perform the dismemberment. They think Juliet should. ("But Juliet - you're a doctor! You kill people every day!") The director, Danny Boyle, wants the disposal scenes to be funny, as he backlights his fastidious characters desperately sawing away at the bones of the dead. There is a touch here of the Coen brothers' "Blood Simple," but if you want to see how a great director gets laughs with the con trast between gruesome deeds and the desire to avoid dry-cleaning bills, look at Martin Scorsese's "Goodfellas." Back at the flat, the desperate situation becomes more unmanageable. The three grow paranoid, and David, the meek accountant, moves into the attic with the cash, drilling holes in the ceiling so he can spy on the activities below. A series of visitors arrive at the flat and discover it is unwise to go up into the attic. The body count mounts. All of the materials are in place for a film that might have pleased Orwell. But somehow they never come together. One of the problems, I think, is that all three conspirators are so unpleasant. Not evil - that would be fine, in material like this - but simply obnoxious in a boring way. To some degree we need to identify with their fear of discovery, and we do not: The only likable character is the police inspector (Ken Stott), who asks insinuating questions and then exchanges significant looks with his assistant. The bottom line in any great murder case, I believe, is the sneaky suspicion that there, but for the grace of God, go we - either as victim or, in our nightmares, murderer. Since no reasonable person can remotely hope to identity with Juliet, David or Alex, the whole case drops through. --Roger Ebert

"Shallow Grave" confirms what many of us have long suspected: Living with roommates can make you murderous. The movie is a nasty little joke but, by the time it ends, you may feel like the joke is on you. It's a black comedy that gets progressively blacker--and redder. David (Christopher Eccleston), Juliet (Kerry Fox) and Alex (Ewan McGregor), who share a cavernous apartment in central Scotland, are looking for a roommate. They grill prospective candidates inquisition-style--they enjoy making them feel unworthy. Perhaps this is because, in their workaday lives, these three seem cowed and unformed--regular people. David, a gangly twit, works as a chartered accountant; Juliet works nights as a physician in a local hospital, Alex is a journalist. In their cocoon-like apartment they come into their own. Cut off from the outside world, they create their own romper room of knockabout neuroses. They take turns lording it over each other. It's a * folie a trois . In the course of their roomie search they end up with a fresh corpse in their flat. Their moral dilemma: Should they turn over to the police the valise bulging with cash belonging to the corpse? It doesn't take long for the shovels and hacksaws to come out, with body parts stuffed in the attic--and more parts to come. What's shocking, and funny, about "Shallow Grave" is that the trio's transition from home-grown batty to butcher batty is accomplished without a hitch. Their sawing and stuffing is just an extension of their self- enclosed sniping. In a weirdly apt way, the bloodletting dovetails nicely into their careers: David is fanatical about accounting for body parts, Juliet spends a lot of time around corpses anyway, and Alex, in the film's tartest cackle, gets assigned by his newspaper to cover the murders. Director Danny Boyle and screenwriter John Hodge (who is a physician!) keep the action spurting forward, but their approach is oblique. We seem to be catching the odds and ends of scenes; it's as if the filmmakers wanted to make a movie in which all the expected high points were skimped. (What we see, except for some garish torture flashbacks, is the bloody aftermath of the crimes.) The film is a modernist tease, but perhaps the modernism is there to distract from the basic pulp dreadfulness of the conception. "Shallow Grave" is a hermetically sealed shocker with a cast of characters who come across like sporty zombies. Maybe this is why the film seems vaguely futuristic. It has a sci-fi sheen. British black comedies about murder, like, say "The Ladykillers," used to specialize in tasteful grotesquerie. Cadavers were always good for a few chuckles. "Shallow Grave" is a nouveau version of those tasteful, garish chucklefests. It's much more bloody than its predecessors but, in a way, the too-hip smarty-pants badinage, askew camera angles and fractured storytelling are all attempts at spiffiness. They're attempts to pattern the gruesomeness into a style. Boyle and Hodge want us to know they're above the simple lowdown pleasure of the penny dreadfuls. They want to make a cut-'em-up with * class . Class has its place, but some of us prefer our cut-'em-ups a little more lowdown. --PETER RAINER

Won:Alexander Korda Award for Best British Film

Won:Audience Award; Grand Prix

Won:British Newcomer of the Year - Danny Boyle