Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		3.5
Overall		3.5

Drowning by Numbers Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman April 7, 2023

Peter Greenaway is an unabashed lover of painting and of arcane game playing, and both of those elements suffuse the often weirdly endearing Drowning by Numbers. Greenaway's filmography is not especially long, but it is often patently provocative and often dazzlingly visual, as anyone who has seen The Draughtsman's Contract , The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, Prospero's Books or really just about any of the filmmaker's features will probably agree. Drowning by Numbers is certainly no exception, and if its narrative is deliberately skewed, that may well be because Greenaway himself is on hand in a supplement included on this disc stating overtly that he does not feel cinema is inherently a narrative art. That may strike some as a positively odd thing to say, but on at least one level, it's a rather salient example of the way Greenaway thinks about films, and how certain expectations about what any given film may provide can be both defied and at times deliberately undercut by Greenaway's patently idiosyncratic way of crafting a "story".

On one hand, Drowning by Numbers is almost a Grimm's Fairy Tale documenting three related women who rather weirdly all share the same name, who all end up killing their husbands via a watery grave, but on another level, it offers a completely gonzo meta aspect that ties into the arresting opening (and later repeated) image of a young girl dressed for a costume party skipping rope on a lustrous starlit evening, looking up at the sky and literally counting the stars out loud, stopping when she gets to 100. She mentions to an elderly character later identified as Cissie Colpitts (Joan Plowright) that once you reach 100, everything else is just repetition. Greenaway then takes that metaphor, for whatever it's worth (and, frankly, some viewers may feel it's not really worth all that much), and then starts to fill his alternately static and peripatetic frames with digits ranging from 1 to 100 as the film progresses. Greenaway makes a rather telling joke in his interview about how this affords the audience a whole new way to ferret through a movie without checking their watches every five minutes, since they'll know by the time they see 50, they're more or less half way through.

The "counting game" aspect may provide significant interest for those who wonder where Waldo is or who play any of the "hidden image" games and/or apps that have been around since time immemorial, even if the "narrative" is odd, to say the least. After Plowright's Cissie is introduced, in quick succession we meet two of her relatives, also named Cissie Colpitts (Juliet Stevenson and Joely Richardson). There are therefore three generations in the same family each portraying a kind of facet of an overall Female Archetype that actually struck me as conceptually a bit similar to a major conceit in Men, though in that film the focus is on the opposite gender, so to speak. Both of the younger Cissie characters either have a husband or are soon enough paired (saddled?) with one, and the film goes on to document both of these younger characters following in their elder's footsteps by also murdering their husbands by drowning them.

Two other major characters play into this patently bizarre tale, including the local village coroner Madgett (Bernard Hill), who is willing to look the other way vis a vis any criminal activity like murder, if some illicit "playtime" might be in order (with each/all of the three women, just to be clear). Madgett's son Smut (Jason Edwards) is a sweet kid who is perhaps unhealthily obsessed with death, including by having created his own "game" whereby he marks (and numbers) roadkill he comes across. (Greenaway mentions that Smut is based on his own ten year old self.) Into this often inexplicable plot Greenaway doesn't just weave his series of on screen enumerations, but also riffs on supposed "famous last words" of various historical figures, though that aspect may well need Greenaway's commentary track to completely clarify things. Aside from the general storyline and the completely peculiar characters inhabiting it, Greenaway once again offers an absolutely riveting and unabashedly whimsical production design along with ravishing cinematography in what can seem like the cinematic love child of Federico Fellini and Terry Gilliam.

Drowning by Numbers Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Drowning by Numbers is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Severin Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.67:1. The back cover of this release states this was culled from a "new 4K scan from the original negative personally supervised by Greenaway". Greenaway's films have been almost spectacularly ill served in the high definition era (I'm really hopeful this release augur further exploration of Greenaway's filmography by Severin), and the good news is this high definition offering is often ravishing, with a nicely organic appearance and a really beautifully suffused palette that almost oozes hues at times, per Greenaway's penchant for wanting to recreate a painterly mien with his cinematography (the DP on the film is the redoubtable Sacha Vierny). A lot of the framings of this film exploit the very idea of a frame, yet another allusion to paintings, and the 1080 version offers some surprisingly well detailed depth of field (something that Severin's 4K UHD version arguably improves on). Grain is organic looking throughout, though it does have a tendency to clump and become rather yellowish throughout the film when scenes feature brighter backgrounds. All in all, I tended to find the grain resolution a little more pleasing in the 1080 version than on the 4K UHD disc. Detail levels are typically excellent throughout, but Greenaway and Vierny often seem intent on stuffing frames so full of visual information that it can be hard to take it all in at times.

Drowning by Numbers Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Drowning by Numbers features a nicely rendered DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 track. The film has a rather interesting, almost minimalist, score by Michael Nyman, one based on just a couple of measures of Mozart. That can lend a certain repetitive aspect to some of the underscore, but actual fidelity is fine. A glut of outdoor material also provides ample opportunity for nicely designed ambient environmental effects. Dialogue is rendered cleanly and clearly throughout. Optional English subtitles are available.

Drowning by Numbers Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Audio Commentary with Writer / Director Peter Greenaway


• Painting by Numbers (HD; 14:28) is an engaging 2022 interview with Greenaway, where he discusses some of the film's oddnesses.


• Three Women and a Coroner (HD; 9:53) is a fun interview with Bernard Hill.


• Fear of Drowning (HD; 27:15) is an archival featurette with more interviews.


• Some Greenaway Game Concepts (HD; 5:29) offers a series of images Greenaway crafted that are kind of like "storyboards" for characters or individual frames. These are presented with some informative interstitial text cards.


• Trailer (HD; 2:19)

Drowning by Numbers Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Actually kind of like the works of Terry Gilliam, Peter Greenaway's films are probably not for everyone, and that is probably perhaps truer than ever with regard to Drowning by Numbers, which is odd by even Greenaway standards. I personally love Greenaway, and was delighted to see this in my review queue. It's a quirky film that probably never adds up, despite its prevalence of numbers, but it's stunning to simply watch and the performances are rather sly at times. Technical merits are solid and the supplements very appealing. Recommended.