Drowning by Numbers 4K 1988

Storyline
Tired of her husband's philandering ways, the mother of two daughters drowns her husband. With reluctant help from the local coroner, the murder is covered up. Her daughters are having similar problems with relationships and tend to follow their mother's example, and the coroner reluctantly becomes involved in their murders as well. As the plot progresses, visual and spoken numbers appear in the scenes, counting from one to 100.

User Review
The notion is the same. All things move towards their end, as Nick Cave would romantically have it. Or die violent, arbitrary deaths, as Greenaway would. Bees, cows, men, we are witness to all these deaths, how all of creation is inadvertently eclipsed, as marked one to 100. We need not see any more because as a girl jumping rope says while counting stars, after you count to the first 100 all the other hundreds are the same. It's enough to understand the replicated pattern.

Various games with stakes in the film mirror the one game, life, where existence is the stake, various conspiracies attempt to unlock the meaning, while others obfuscate it. That these deaths, of three husbands at the hands of their wives, are the result of cruel whims and little more. That there's no grand plan or ultimate purpose that justifies the loss, Greenaway always the pessimist and cynical.

The most interesting character in all this is the coroner's son. Who, as his father devises elaborate games to pass idle time, with boyish innocence he wants to know the simplest answers of the universe. How many leaves on a tree, how many hair on a dog? And who commemorates the passing of living things by lighting up fireworks.

Greenaway generally knows how to make an interesting film that is intellectual but not dyspeptic. The fun here is in the form of a typically British black comedy, where deaths are clumsily covered-up and the noose around the culprits' neck is pulled tighter all the time.

He's done better work but this worth watching. If only for the cinematic fireworks of Sacha Vierny.