Danny Boyle’s extraordinary debut remains one of the defining documents of Cool Britannia as it stood in the mid-1990s. Narratively, it’s a morality tale about a trio of friends – Alex (Ewan McGregor), David (Christopher Eccleston) and Juliet (Kerry Fox) – whose lives fall apart when Hugo (Keith Allen), the latest addition to their Edinburgh shareflat, dies and leaves behind a suitcase of cash. Affectively, it’s a snapshot of a time and place, evoking an era when the United Kingdom was seized by hyperbolised belief in its own future after the dark days of the 80s. In the opening scenes, Boyle cuts between sped-up shots of Edinburgh streets and slow pans through a lush forest, all scored to a propulsive beat, suggesting that both the “urban” and “natural” worlds have become increasingly irreal, and require a new cinematic vocabulary to properly parse them. These hyper-kinetic and dozily dreamlike sequences immediately conjure up a rave-pastoral continuum, a global dancefloor that both embeds Britain in a delirious global network (David’s opening monologue notes that “this could have been any city – they’re all the same”) and reinvests the United Kingdom with an indigenous hyper-reality. Before even meeting the main characters, they seem to exist in a world in which Britishness has been enhanced and refurbished in the process of being mediated around the globe, and then captured and crystallised in the vortical DNA-like spiral staircase that anchors their apartment complex, in a kind of frozen trance pulse, networked rhythms turned visible.

Accordingly, their shared flat plays as a kind of Cool Brittania diaspora, encompassing David, who is English, Alex, who is Scottish, and Juliet, who is Australian. From the outset, this shared flat, and shared flats generally, are offered by Boyle as a kind of incipient network, a quilting-point in the endless and ebullient flow of Britishness across the planet, situating Shallow Grave alongside films of the era such as Truly Madly Deeply and Bound (along with a whole range of television series) in which apartments are presented as object lessons in a new kind of space: one that is both contained and ultra-connected, consisting of nodes and links rather than traditional thresholds or boundaries. Those older markers of bourgeois space are here condensed into the red door, name plaque and courtesy doormat that greets visitors at the front of David, Alex and Juliet’s apartment – a trio of fixtures that gestures towards a street life that, from their vantage point on the top floor, at the extremity of the spiral staircase, feels like an unimaginably arcane fragment of the past, much as the external shots of the building always morph its historic coordinates into a more distorted and dimorphic spatiality.

At the same time, Shallow Grave belongs to a cultural moment when the rise of a new generation of urban tribes and chosen families made inner city flatsharing trendy as never before. In the opening scene of the film, Alex lists the criteria for a fourth addition to the apartment like it’s the most prestigious job imaginable while David frankly positions it as a corollary to professional upward mobility, asking a prospective tenant to “turn very briefly to corporate finance – leverage buyouts – a good thing or a bad thing?” The trio also mercilessly grill interviewees about their taste in music and go so far as to take photographs with them to check whether they work in the broader mise-en-scene of their shared apartment life. At stake, once again, is the idea of flatsharing as an early networked state, a nodal experience that, if modulated correctly, can so exceed the sum of its parts that it permits the individual involved to achieve a kind of stranger-intimacy, or ambient linkage, to the globalised world.

Before the crisis of Shallow Grave even occurs, then, the apartment brims with a kind of illbient potential, an openness to forces and energies that are beyond the characters’ control. This takes the form of a kind of spatial dysphoria in which their shared settings are either far too small, such as a squash court, and their tiny car, or much too large, most notably in the apartment itself, which as a top floor unit is filled with a veritable excess of space, both in the sweep and height of the rooms. Moreover, the apartment is never quite permitted to settle into naturalism, thanks to continuous intrusions and echoes of the opening trance pulse, especially in the persistently ringing telephone. Most of the time the callers seem to be Juliet’s unwelcome admirers, to the point where her default response is to say that she is not a home, or even ignore the call together, the net result of which is to produce an enormous distance between caller and recipient, such that the phone always seems to be ringing from somewhere unimaginably remote, a location utterly discorrelated from conventional conversation. In other words, the phone already exudes the arcane and exotic energies of dial-up, acting as a portal to an emergent etherspace that’s already brimming with volatility.

Of course, this all comes to a head with Hugo, the new tenant, who abruptly dies, leaves behind a suitcase full of cash, and in doing so brings this networked space to fruition. For several days, the corpse and cash become a new pair of fixtures in the apartment as the trio decide what to do with them, eventually congealing to a kind of early internet node, expanding the dimensions of the space to an unthinkably diffuse realm. Boyle captures this process beautifully by way of an extended montage sequence that juxtaposes the trio at work with looming shots of the body and suitcase in the apartment alone, suffusing these previously quotidian spaces with an exotic connectivity. Between the body and the suitcase, this moment forms the fracture point of the film, at which the characters find their own corporeal experience centripeting out around the staircase of the apartment and beyond their agency and autonomy. Accordingly this spiral motif starts to predominate – in Juliet’s manic dancing at a medical benefit, in the camera’s movements as it circles around Alex as he watches a television game show, and in the shape of the narrative itself, which sees Hugo’s criminal colleagues curving ever closer to the trio, leaving a string of atrocities in their wake.

In an attempt to stave off this spiralling threat, Alex and Juliet create a feedback loop of their own, using part of the proceeds of their theft to purchase a video camera and hook it up to the apartment television so they can watch their hijinks in real time. Yet this effort to thwart the burgeoning space of the internet, as it accrues around the peripheries of the apartment, with an intranet of their own, actually brings that virtual world even closer, since it’s in the midst of watching and performing in one of these live loops that the phone rings again, this time with nothing on the other end of the line but looming static. That conjunction of telephone, static and real-time mediation brings the film’s connectivity to a peak, so it’s only a matter of time before this amorphous outside coalesces into an unexpected knock at the door that neither Alex nor Juliet are expecting. The moment they answer, the apartment is besieged by a sudden and brutal eruption of violence – a sensory as much as a physical shock that leaves them reeling with the force field of it all before they can process what’s happened.

Meanwhile, David, who disapproves of the camera purchase, takes a slightly different tack. Rather than trying to contain the remediatory outside within the space of the apartment, he attempts to map this incipient networked field. Barricading himself in the attic with the remainder of the money, he drills regular holes in the ceiling so he can scrutinise what is taking place in the rooms below, thereby giving form to the abstracted network that is quickly coming to undergird the trio’s experience of everyday space. This attic vantage point is both structured and fluid, as evinced in David’s decision to sequester the money in a water tank, which gives way to a series of perspectives up through the liquid as one character after another checks that the cash is still there. Much of the second half of the film alternates between vertical shots from the attic and POV shots from deep within the cistern, evoking the virtual “outside” as a zone that is somehow both above and below the apartment, both surveilling it from on high and forming its foundation. Hence the twist of the film, which sees the camera pan down to reveal that Alex has taken the money and reconcealed it beneath the floorboards, along with the second-order twist, or meta-twist; namely, that these two spaces above and below the visible world of the apartment are actually the very same space.

In the closing scenes of the film these two spaces converge, while gathering in all the alterior virtualities that have circulated around the apartment – the spiral staircase, the sped-up streets outside, the nefarious centrifuge of the criminals’ activities, and most distantly the exotically oversaturated forest where the trio bury the body, harbinger of a new globally dispersed and atavistically amorphous global playspace. The last vestiges of bodily experience are left to assert themselves in the apartment, via a gratingly physical and violent conclusion – heads slammed in fridges, bodies crashing across pots and pans, and a final showdown in which David stabs Alex on the ground and then uses (what he thinks are) the bags of money to slam the knife in so far that his quarry cannot get up. In these final moments, we see Generation X reaching the horizons of what it can conceptualise in terms of bodily and virtual experience, so it makes sense that Boyle will both extend and close in those horizons through extreme drug addiction in Trainspotting, the spiritual sequel to this galvanising debut effort.