Dig!: "Shallow Grave"

Thirty years ago, after a noteworthy TV career (including the rave episode of Inspector Morse), Manchester's own Danny Boyle burst onto cinema screens. Shallow Grave's opening movement - a bumper-level, Leftfield-scored whizz over the Edinburgh cobblestones, restlessly craning to see what's up above or around the next corner - would help define the giddy, wide-eyed, eternally optimistic Boyle gaze in the years that followed. Yet this remains the director's most contained film, mostly unfolding on a single set, painted like Godard's mid-Sixties movies and big enough for Ewan McGregor to ride a bike around at one point. A workably tight John Hodge script charts the breakdown in relations between three insufferably cliquely flatmates (we've all known them) - journo Alex (McGregor), nurse Juliet (Kerry Fox) and chartered surveyor David (Christopher Eccleston) - after the discovery of a million pounds in tax-free used banknotes and a naked, dead Keith Allen in the flat's fourth bedroom. (Some might say Boyle was already on the right track in killing Allen off early, given the actor's track record in early Nineties British thrillers.) It's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, essentially, brought indoors to counter a far cooler and rainier climate.

The scale of that set was the tipoff: here were creatives thinking big (key lines in Eccleston's opening narration: "this could be any city; they're all the same") and prepared to warp and razz the realism that had been Brit cinema's stock-in-trade for the better part of three decades. It was still identifiably British, as demonstrated by an odd little time-capsule moment: McGregor's wastrel telly addict chuckling at Lose a Million, the Chris Tarrant-hosted game show subsequently overwritten by Who Wants to be a Millionaire?. (A later clip from The Wicker Man now seems to announce the Boyle who masterminded the London 2012 opening ceremony.) Yet its dynamics were something else: the film was slick, irreverent, mischievous in a way the American movies we'd grown up watching were. That confidence was helpful, because it ushered us past Hodge's shakier plotting: I'm still not sure how our trio of anti-heroes get so many dead bodies downstairs without the neighbours noticing, nor why Alex and Juliet stay put after David starts waving a drill around. Thankfully, Boyle's feel for casting and personality is vastly more secure: we know the leads are in mortal danger once Peter Mullan is revealed as one of the goons closing in on them, and individual scenes gain considerably from the interplay between Fox's abrasive matter-of-factness, Eccleston's quiet intensity and McGregor's shit-eating grin. Next stop: Trainspotting. These were careers that hit the ground running, and then some.

Shallow Grave returns to selected cinemas from tomorrow.