Drowning by Numbers carries the cozy murder mystery through its own inversion into a lovely third imaginary reality. The comfort remains circular, nostalgic; Greenaway’s formal intelligence gives it cosmological significance.
The murders feel like blood sacrifices toward a spiritual gift, lightly celebrated by a coven of three women. Their decisions accumulate until the pattern creates something wider than the plot. I can’t even call it evil. The women begin to seem like the masters of reality; the man is this fat, drowning figure being disposed of.
There’s a soft misogyny here, beautiful and calming enough to suggest Taoism: the yielding woman manipulates the stolid man into his grave. The lightheartedness of that arrangement is spiritual. Death is leavening.
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