News

“Drowning By Numbers” (1988) is the kind of movie that dares you to look away, yet it is impossible. Every frame pulls you in, teeming with an intense visual wit and a playful morbidity that lingers long after the credits roll. This is another film that once I start watching, I can’t turn it off. Directed by Peter Greenaway, a filmmaker known for his baroque sensibilities, this movie is arguably one of his most accessible works. “Drowning By Numbers” is a cerebral puzzle with a lot of emotional depth, and if you’ve never seen a Greenaway film before, this is the perfect place to start. This was the first Greenaway film that I watched, and I was hooked ever since.

I’m a longtime fan of Peter Greenaway. His films have a way of making you feel like you’re really in his world, as if you’re watching...

From its opening moments, of a girl jumping rope while counting and naming the stars in the nighttime sky, Peter Greenaway’s Drowning by Numbers is perhaps the most direct illustration of the filmmaker’s key thematic and aesthetic interest in ascribing structure to a chaotic universe. Throughout, the film slowly counts from one to 100 via a combination of character dialogue and visual markers sprinkled in frames like an elaborate game of I Spy. In deadpan voiceovers, a young boy also elaborates the byzantine rules of made-up games whose goals seem altogether too banal to be worth their complexity.

The plot that strings together these playful games involves three women, each named Cissie Colpitts, who drown their husbands and enlist the help of a coroner, Madgett (Bernard Hill), to cover up the crimes. In a relatively light preamble to the darker feminist revenge drama of Greenaway’s subsequent The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover...