Review of Shallow Grave on blu-ray:

Movie: 3/5
Shallow Grave is a black-comedy thriller that centres on 3 unattached young adults, Alex, Juliet and David (Ewan McGregor, Kerry Fox and Christopher Eccelston) living together who are looking for a new room mate. To do so, they hold uncomfortable interviews with all that are interested, and ask them bizarre and personal questions for what seems to be the sole purpose of finding someone interesting and who will fit in with their fucked up way of behaving and socializing.

They eventually find someone suitable by the name of Hugo (played by Keith Allen), who is friendly, charming and most importantly (to the group) is seemingly well off, finantially.

The group go about their day to day to day life, David is a chartered accountant, Juliet is a Doctor and Alex is a Journalist, and after a few days, they begin to realize that they haven’t seen Hugo around, but his car is still parked outside. Thinking it will be a laugh, they break the mans door in, only to find his butt naked corpse draped across his bed, and a suitcase packed full of cash under his bed.

Do they call the police? Or bury the body and decide to keep the money for themselves? Fortunately, it’s the latter, otherwise there wouldn’t be much of a movie. Lies, Paranoia, betrayal and insane behaviour begin to unfold within the group when they realize there are two unnamed gangsters on a violent pursuit for hugo and the case of money, and two detectives have also made their suspicion perfectly apparent during an interview with David.

In 1994, Shallow Grave made it’s mark as the directorial debut of Danny Boyle who would then go on to direct such classics as Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, Slumdog Millionaire and 127 hours, not to mention one of my all time favourite science fiction films Sunshine, that for some reason was pretty much ignored by critics and audiences.
This was also a big film for the 3 lead stars Ewan McGregor, Christopher Eccelston and Kerry Fox who were all relatively little known actors at the time, so Shallow Grave gave them the exposure they needed.

I really enjoyed this movie. It jogged along at a brisk pace, there was never a dull moment, the acting, camera work and the music were all spot on and the black-comedy style to it had me laughing out loud quite a few times, and the parts more fitting for the thriller genre were actually pretty effective and creepy.
This is a really impressive debut film, one of the best in my opinion. Could this movie of been bigger, or better? Bigger, more fleshed out, certainly! But I think it was made at the right time, with the right crew and the right actors. It felt like a lot of love and effort was put into Shallow Grave, and it’s fantastic.

Picture Quality: 4/5
For some reason Shallow Grave is a little hard to assess in this department. I read a fair bit of complaining about how this blu-ray looks, so I approached it with hesitation and even put off buying it until I found a good deal on it. I’m so glad I did too! It won’t win any awards for best picture quality, but it looks pretty damn good for the age and budget restraints it was under.

Hair in particular whether it be on the head or on the face looks really lovely, and detailed. There’s a close up of Ewan McGregor on the phone to someone, and you can see every facial hair around his mouth. While something that striking is rare in this movie, there are quite a few moments of high level clarity.

Colours in this film for the most part are not striking, bright or exciting looking. Colours on clothing, household objects or furnature are all pretty muted, pastal and dull, and while it initially bothered me, I came to realize that it was obviously intentional since there are moments where colours are indeed bright and vivid such as reds in lights or blood. Perhaps at the time it wouldn’t of been appreciated as much, but watching it now, it has a spacious 90’s artsy fartsy look where there isn’t any particular style to the house, just objects that everybody in the house would use.

I never got around to seeing it on dvd, but I’ve seen screenshots of some releases and this is a great improvement over them. For a long time the movie had a yellowish green tinge to it, fleshtones were quite orange, there was no definition in anything, and it was just plain ugly.

Skin tones in this blu-ray are pale and natural looking, the movie has no yellowish green tinge to it and there while there are some soft looking shots, mostly when the camera is far away from people, there is plenty of definition to enjoy here.

Audio Quality: 4/5 
Not much to say in this department. Dialogue is a little quiet, but music and louder parts of the movie are considerably louder. Turn the volume up abit more than you usually would and there is no problems :)

 Extra’s: 3.5/5
There isn’t much here, but the great thing is, is that it’s all exclusive to the special edition dvd and blu-ray releases from the UK.

-Audio Commentary with Director Danny Boyle

-Digging your own grave 
This is a 30 minute featurette, in which Boyle discusses his attempts to secure funding for Shallow Grave at the Edinburgh film festival. There’s a lot of archival footage of shooting, auditions etc

-On Shallow Grave
2 short clips with additional information about Shallow Grave, one with Danny Boyle which is only around 2 minutes long, and another with Ewan McGregor which is around 8 minutes

Overall: 
It’s not as epic in nature as Danny Boyles later films, but Shallow Grave is one of the most impressive feature film debuts I’ve seen to date. It had a small budget, and the film feels small, restrained even, which is how I imagine the characters in this movie were feeling as their situation progressed. Anyone who appreciates black-comedies should check this out!