This cold-blooded dissection of English upper-class immorality begins when brooding aristocrat Gabriel Byrne kills a woman while on a drunken drive through London, and his old-school pals, along for the ride, decide not to report the accident. It's a great hook, but no one can think of anything to hang on it. There's a teasing suggestion that the hit-and-run might not have been entirely accidental, but what begins to develop as a mystery emerges, instead as a vague character study, although it's unclear if that character is meant to be (in a portentous metaphor) England herself. The film could have been twice as fascinating at half the length; too much of the slim 87 minute running time is padded with Byrne's sexual domination fantasies (which no doubt explain the NC-17 rating), and with redundant scenes of the idle, decadent rich at play: regimental buddies riding piggyback around the dining room, and so forth.
