SOURCE: Quinn, Anthony. “Painting by Degrees.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4458 (9 September 1988): 991.

In the following review of Drowning by Numbers, Quinn offers a negative assessment of Greenaway's sparse characterizations and empty plot.

The director's notes in the rather lavish press kit to Drowning by Numbers inform us that the film is about “the conspiracy of women.” This theme is not a new one for Peter Greenaway: the brash arriviste Mr Neville is undone by the aristocratic mother and daughter in The Draughtsman's Contract (1982), and The Belly of an Architect (1987) charted the slow, sad disintegration of a man cuckolded by his young wife. The style, too, is familiar: Drowning by Numbers is another of Greenaway's formalist teases, an elaborate weave of games, conundrums, echoes, pictorial puns and famous last words. At its centre is an unholy trinity of women, each called Cissie Colpitts, and each vaguely dissatisfied with her male...