Beautiful Creatures Release Date: April 6, 2001 Starring: Susan Lynch, Rachel Weisz, Iain Glen Directed by: Bill Eagles
Single American women, take heart: Things could be worse. You could be living in Glasgow, Scotland, a place that if Beautiful Creatures is a reliable indicator boasts the largest population of male scum per capita in the Western world. Seriously; this is a movie in which the sole sympathetic male character is a dog. Imagine Thelma & Louise crossed with Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, with a soupçon of Shallow Grave thrown in (Andrew Macdonald, of the Boyle-Hodge-Macdonald team that made Grave, is an executive producer here); if you're excited by now, this is the film for you. An often grisly, darkly comic thriller, Creatures opens with the attractive but plain-dressing Dorothy (Susan Lynch) getting into a row with her laddish boyfriend Tony (Iain Glen). Tony goes from laddish to thuggish in record time, and Dorothy winds up shivering and penniless at a bus station. Led from there by her agitated dog, Dorothy finds herself coming to the aid of the more bombshellish Petula (Rachel Weisz), who's in the process of getting throttled by her boyfriend Brian (Tom Mannion). Said boyfriend is soon horrifically dead. Dorothy and Petula bond over a haircut as they try to figure out what to do with the body. Next, with very little clue about what they're stepping into, they're improvising a scheme to get them out of Glasgow forever. Can't blame them. Contemporary U.K. filmmakers have gotten into this habit of making their homeland look slightly less livable than the eighth circle of Dante's hell, and director Bill Eagles makes no exception here. Just as the labyrinthine plot is a bit too neat, Eagles's compositions and color schemes (at one point, Dorothy sports a knit cap that's the exact shade of blue as her apartment walls) are a trifle overdetermined. But the movie's also fueled by a conspicuous cheekiness that gives it a twisted charm—with a corpse on her balcony, Dorothy decides it's the perfect time to freshen up Petula's hairdo. If you've got the stomach for it—and you might not, given the number of times the movie's dog is imperiled—Creatures is satisfyingly nasty and sometimes, courtesy of Weisz's sexy, endearingly ditzy performance, quite a bit of all right, as the lads might say.
