This August, The Frida Cinema proudly presents Greenaway & Nyman, a film series celebrating four of the most iconic collaborations between filmmaker Peter Greenaway and composter Michael Nyman.  Our series’ third film is 1988’s Drowning by Numbers, Greenaway’s wickedly playful and morbid game of murder, repetition, and structure.

Joan Plowright, Juliet Stevenson, and Joely Richardson star as three women from the same family, all of whom are each named Cissie Colpitts. Under seemingly rational pretenses, each woman drowns her own husband — but rather than seek justice, local coroner Madgett (Bernard Hill) becomes complicit, lured by his own ambitions. Structured like a counting game by literally placing the numbers 1 through 100 sequentially within its visuals and dialogue, Drowning by Numbers is an exercise in visual beauty marked by escalating absurdity, a grimly comic dark fable about rules, rituals, fate, and numbers.

Nominated for the Palm d’Or at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival, Drowning By Numbers took home the festival’s Best Artistic Contribution prize, and won the Best Director Award at the Seattle International Film Festival.

About GREENAWAY & NYMAN

Peter Greenaway Michael Nyman on the set of Prospero’s Books. Photo by Jacques PRAYER/Gamma-Rapho, via Getty Images)

British artist, writer, and director Peter Greenaway’s cinema is unmistakable — baroque, cerebral, and boldly theatrical, his films unfold like elaborate paintings, rich with symbolism, obsession, and wry absurdity. Equally distinctive is fellow British composer Michael Nyman, whose hypnotic, minimalist scores pulse with alternating elegance and urgency. Together, their collaborations form a sublime marriage of image and sound, a cinematic alchemy that’s as unsettling as it is exquisite. In our series Greenaway & Nyman, The Frida Cinema presents five of their most iconic collaborations, providing filmgoers a rare opportunity to immerse themselves in these signature masterpieces of sight and sound.

Our series begins with The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982), a visually lush mystery that sets the tone for Greenaway’s preoccupations with artifice, geometry, and sexual politics. The surreal A Zed & Two Noughts (1985) dives into symmetry, decay, and evolution, setting its tale of twin zoologists against time-lapse decompositions and haunting harpsichords. In Drowning by Numbers (1988), three women named Cissie Colpitts methodically dispatch their husbands in a darkly comic ballet of murder and counting. Our series ends with perhaps their most infamous collaboration, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), a lurid, operatic fable of gluttony and vengeance, drenched in color and scored with tragic grandeur. Each film is a sensuous, intellectual puzzle, all the more provocative and mesmerizing in the hands of Greenaway and Nyman.