Why a 1988 crime comedy hides every number from one to one hundred

Entertainment · Published 3 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Peter Greenaway’s Drowning by Numbers is a structural puzzle disguised as a dark fairy tale. Across the film, three women murder their husbands, while a coroner is lured into covering their tracks. Every number from one to one hundred appears on screen, creating a rhythmic, obsessive game of cinematic arithmetic.

Released in 1988, Drowning by Numbers follows three women—a grandmother, her daughter, and her niece, all named Cissie Colpitts—who each drown their respective husbands. The coroner, Madgett, is cajoled into concealing these crimes, a repetitive narrative structure that mirrors the logic of fairy tales like The Billy Goats Gruff. As the plot unfolds, Madgett is promised escalating rewards for his complicity, while his son, Smut, recites the rules of invented games as if they were ancient, established traditions.

The film is defined by its rigid, numerical obsession. Every integer from one to one hundred is woven into the background, printed on livestock, or spoken by characters. This structural device is matched by a score from Michael Nyman, which draws exclusively from the slow movement of a Mozart composition. Greenaway instructed Nyman to focus on specific bars of the piece, a process that began as early as the late 1970s. The music serves as a recurring motif, playing in its original form immediately following each of the three drownings.

While the film received generally favourable reviews, including an award for Best Artistic Contribution at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival, it remains a divisive work. Roger Ebert, for instance, admired the cinematography in Southwold, Suffolk, but questioned the ultimate purpose of the project. Despite this, the film’s influence has persisted, inspiring everything from electronic music firmware and black metal albums to narrative devices in television shows like How I Met Your Mother, where a countdown sequence mimics the film’s numerical fixation.

The film's legacy is also embedded in its own soundtrack. The album, which was the seventh to feature the Michael Nyman Band, includes subtle nods to the score's origins. For example, the number 58 appears on the back cover of the album booklet, corresponding to the point where the film’s opening character, a girl jumping rope, reaches in her counting game. This figure points directly to the specific bars of the Mozart work that form the foundation of Nyman’s musical arrangement.

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