Drowning by Numbers – 1988 | 118mins | Drama, Comedy | Colour

Plot Synopsis

Maverick director Peter Greenaway wrote and directed this typically surreal black-comedy that deals with the allegorical game-playing of sex and death during an idyllic Suffolk summer. Greenaway deals with his favourite themes of love, death, sexuality and especially the veneer the lies beneath feminism. The acting is consistently excellent and Joan Plowright, Juliet Stevenson and Joely Richardson are delightfully ghoulish in their scheming. As the story unfolds, the director indulges his love of numbers by literally counting sequentially from 1 to 100, the numbers appearing somewhere on screen. The film is elegantly scored by Michael Nyman and luminously shot in baroque colours by cinematographer Sacha Vierney.

The film follows the darkly murderous acts of three women three generations of women all named Cissie Colpitts; mother (Joan Plowright), daughter (Juliet Stevenson) and grad-daughter (Joely Richardson). The family have discovered the same way of dealing with their marital problems; drowning. The senior Cissie begins by drowning her adulterous husband Jake (Bryan Pringle) in a tin bath. An alibi is supplied by their friend the local coroner Madgett (Bernard Hill) who records the death as accidental.

Her daughter dispatches her spouse Hardy (Trevor Cooper) to a watery grave whilst swimming in the sea, and the youngest Cissie drowns her husband Bellamy (David Morrissey) in the local swimming pool. Madgett continues to provide an alibi for the three women in the hope and expectation one will submit as promised to his sexual advances.

As the water-related body count grows the villagers become suspicious the trio are murdering the fallen husbands and that Madgett is supplying an alibi. Madgett decides to admit his part in the murders but his teenage son’s (Jason Edwards) gameplaying instincts come to his aid. He organizes a game of tug-of-war between the town’s accusers and the Colpitt women – with a river in the middle.