Rating: 3/5
A girl in a glowing white dress jumps rope while counting each star and giving its name. In the foreground, a bird of prey hangs from a gibbet. The girl’s jump rope and the bird’s eyes glow at night. A drunk couple ambles past her as she counts. The Southwold Lighthouse spins its guiding light. She gets to one hundred and stops.
Once you've counted to 100, all the other hundreds are the same.
We meet the drunk couple as the man pours her a bath. They strip down, and the woman screams in delight, running out into the night to get her bath. Cissie, the man’s wife, arrives on the scene and holds her husband’s head underwater. He drowns and dies.
Throughout the film, we meet three married women named Cissie Colpitts. We follow their story as each woman drowns her husband, and the coroner covers up for them.
The movie introduces a conceit in which the numbers 1 to 100 appear throughout the film—if you’ve seen the How I Met Your Mother episode, you understand immediately.
Each scene has a dense composition of elements, like a classical painting. You can pause the movie at nearly any point and see painterly images. Often, they feel like scenes from an I Spy book, where the filmmakers have carefully arranged objects and characters. In that sense, it also reminds me of Wes Anderson’s fussier films.
There’s an inherent Britishness to this movie that prevents me from fully understanding it. While playful and absurd, I found it difficult to care about much. So much of the film is Smut giving rules to non-existent games, and the repetition, while thematic, is tiresome.
This film is artful, but I missed the connection that would have made it great.