If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Brilliant and touching

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

This is more than just a movie,it is also a series of games and puzzles that we can play along with.Along the way things- and occasionally people- are constantly catalogued and numbered in clever and subtle ways.These numbers serve as signposts, indicating how far along we are, and sometimes they also have underlying meanings and echo.For example, note the number the skipping girl in the opening scene stops at.Her explanation for stopping at that particular number neatly ties in with the very last scene.The cinematography is superb.Many of the scenes look like oil paintings - both still lives and landscapes- by the old masters which, sort of startlingly,contain movement and life.There are also lots of scenes shot with colour filters or very intensely focused lighting, which makes for surreal but vivid and striking effects.All the actors do an excellent job, but two- Bernard Hill and Joan Plowright especially stand out for their superb elocution and deadpan wit.Finally, Michael Nyman's musical scoring is a treat.Ultimately, Drowning by Numbers is a black comedy but somehow a very lighthearted and engaging one.

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.

There are some rare films where you discover something new each time you watch, and this is such a case. Initially you might watch it for the simple fairy-tale story (like all good fairy tales, there is repetition and a good deal of nasty goings-on). Then you might try to spot the ascending numbers that are sometimes obvious in the frame, sometimes spoken by the characters or sometimes really obscure (can you spot 86?). You may wonder whether any of the games - some of which are brilliantly conceived, like The Great Death Game - have ever really been played, or whether they are just products of Greenaway's imagination. Then you start seeing strange connections, like the one between the water tower conspirators' names - all from the apocryphal last words of famous people - and the way each of the Cissies destroys an object symbolic of her husband's occupation at the time of each murder.Even after ten viewings, the film will still have you wondering. The star names at the beginning, for example, contain other Greenaway characters and "Adnams", which is the Suffolk brewer based in Southwold (the Skipping Girl's home is a real Southwold house, by the way, called Seaview House, although there is no Amsterdam Road!).Ultimately the characters' motives are the hardest to understand. Each of the three Cissies (mother, daughter and niece) encourages the next to dispose of her unsatisfactory husband, with Madgett used as a pawn to cover up the murders. However, there are several strong suggestions that a fifth person is behind the whole plot, with its twin themes of counting and death. There is a twist at the end, however, that means things don't quite work out as intended.It's fantastic and surreal to look at, with the typical garishly coloured and deliberately over-lit scenes used by Greenaway in his other films, and quite affecting, although it's hard to feel sympathy for many of the characters involved. I give it 10/10 for its sheer uniqueness and ability to make the viewer think.

Despite the misanthropy, this is the only Peter Greenaway movie that I actually enjoyed. (Admittedly, this may have something to do with the ratio of female to male genitalia in this film as compared to some of Greenaway's others.) The bit with the numbers is original and clever. It's all sensuously and beautifully shot. Joely Richardson is really quite attractive here. The games are sort of neat.