roystephen-81252 British director Peter Greenaway was very popular among European university students in the late 1980s and early 1990s. His painterly style paired with Michael Nyman's minimalistic neo-baroque music yielded some of the most unique and interesting art films of the period (The Draughtsman's Contract; The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover; Prospero's Books etc.). Drowning by Numbers is my favourite and has remained in my all-time Top 20 ever since.It is probably Greenaway's least bizarre and most accessible work and the one that strays furthest from being another moving baroque painting, but it is just as highly structured and densely infused with statistics-like enumerations (another common trait of Greenaway's movies). Numbers, repetition, symmetry and surreal, invented nursery games create an intricate web in which the story of three women drowning their husbands unfolds. Joan Plowright and Bernard Hill give memorable performances here (as usual), but a Greenaway movie is never really about story or performances, but puzzles, imaginative structuring and an eye-opening, fresh perspective on people's motives and dark secrets.Being one of the most unusual filmmakers, Greenaway should not be overlooked, and Drowning by Numbers is a perfect initiation into his world. It might not be as shocking and powerful as The Baby of Macon, but it is just as gripping and, for a Greenaway movie, surprisingly funny and warm.

chaos-rampant 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.

gio32 Seen by accident on a not-so-important TV-stations program in the 90ies, I 've been impressed by the clearly identifyable patterns that make this film a wonderful puzzle of games, death and numbers. My wife and me started a numbering game after having seen this movie together, that lasts for quite a long time right now.u Just my favorite movie of all.

bechamel Not much I can add to the rave reviews above. A simple-complicated-ugly-beautiful-puzzle-painting of a film, which demands repeated viewings."Drowning" is not for everyone - but look at the breakdown on that voting. As I write this, this film got more "10"s than any other number. I'm not into lists, but if you forced me, this would be my number one.Go see (or rather go buy). If you've seen it before, see it again - new layers reveal themselves even now.