A man lies dead in a bathtub in a Bristol flat, David Bowie’s ‘Heroes’ playing on the radio. His brother sets off from London in a battered Rover to find out what happened. He doesn’t. And neither do we, for that matter.


Not, perhaps, the most compelling of pitches (I’d like to see this get past the Film Council these days), but rookie director Chris Petit (Time Out’s film editor during much of the Seventies) was by his own admission completely uninterested in, and ill-equipped to deal with, such cinematic staples as plot, narrative development or psychology. If Hitchock’s actors were cattle, Petit’s are lab rats, trapped in a maze they have no understanding of and no way of escaping; or they’re figures in a landscape, placed there to anchor the eye and draw us into one of the strangest pictures of Britain ever put on screen.